Death is America
Sir: John Rowan Wilson is right (July 10). The death rate has not gone down in the past quarter of a century because new diseases have appeared to replace those which organic medicine has cured. But would he praise a mechanic who mends punctures in a tyre, when the real trouble is a leaking valve?
George Teeling Smith, of the Office of Health Economics — the pharmaceutical industry's figleaf — is for all I know right, too, in claiming that although the death rate is now rising again, in America, John Doe still can expect to live longer than his father because it is the older generation who are dying fastest. But this is a quibble; the fact is that since the introduction of the wonder drugs—the antibiotics, the corticosteroids, the tranquillisers, and all the other achievements of organic medicine— the death rate has stopped its long fall, and begun to rise. And the United States public health authorities admit they do not know why.
Perhaps it would help if they looked at the death rates per 1,000 for individual states of the Union. from: Alaska 5.3 New Mexico 6.6 Utah 6.7 to: New York 10.2 Massachussets 11.0 Washington (D.C.) 11.3 As Mr Teeling Smith complains about my "remarkable talent for misinterpreting statistics," I shall not attempt to explain them; but it may be of interest that the death rates are in inverse proportion to the number of qualified practitioners — in other words, the number of men licensed to prescribe modern drugs.
Brian Inglis 20 Albion St, London W2.