Sounds Ridiculous??!! Well think again. What if you were told that over 100,000 people are killed and over 2 million people maimed and disabled every year... year after year from modern medicine... would you believe it??

Well these may be my words... but read the following articles from the most respected medical journals and institutions (Journal of the American Medical Association, Harvard University, Centers for Disease Control, British medical journal The Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine and national news,New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, US World Report) and you be the judge.

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Dr Starfield has documented the tragedy of the traditional medical paradigm in the following statistics: (Deaths per year)

106,000 – Non-error, negative effects of drugs

80,000 – Infections in hospitals

45,000 – Other errors in hospitals

12,000 – Unnecessary surgery

7,000 – Medication errors in hospital

Total – 250,000 deaths from ‘iatrogenic’ causes

* The term iatrogenic is defined as "induced in a patient by a physician's activity, manner, or therapy. Used especially to pertain to a complication of treatment." Furthermore, these estimates of death due to error are lower than those in a recent Institutes of Medicine report.

If the higher estimates are used, the deaths due to iatrogenic causes would range from 230,000 to 284,000. Even at the lower estimate of 225,000 deaths per year, this constitutes the third leading cause of death in the US.

"The bottom line is we have a system that is terribly out of control," said Robert Brook, a professor of medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles. "It's really a joke to worry about the occasional plane that goes down when we have thousands of people who are killed in hospitals every year." Brook's recognition of the extent of hospital errors is shared by many of medicine's leaders.

Mayo Clinic researchers report that antibiotics, antidepressants and painkiller opioids are the most common prescriptions given to Americans. Twenty percent of US patients were also found to be on five or more prescription medications. The study is uncovering valuable information to the researchers about US prescription practices.

“Often when people talk about health conditions they’re talking about chronic conditions such as heart disease or diabetes,” Dr St Sauver stated in a Mayo Clinic press release. “However, the second most common prescription was for antidepressants — that suggests mental health is a huge issue and is something we should focus on. And the third most common drugs were opioids, which is a bit concerning considering their addicting nature.”

Expenditures on prescription drugs reached $250 billion in 2009, and accounted for 12 percent of total personal health care expenditures. According to the CDC, the percent of persons using at least one prescription drug in the past month increased nearly 50 percent between 2007 and 2010. And the researchers said prescription drug spending will only increase in the future.

Yet what causes me to hesitate is the drip of reports and comments from key figures in – or near – the Fed seeming to suggest a loss of nerve, or who fear that QE has turned counterproductive. First we had a paper co-written by Frederic Mishkin – Bernanke’s close friend and a former board member – warning that is becoming ever harder for the Fed to extricate itself safely from QE, and the door may shut altogether from 2014.

“Crunch Time: Fiscal Crises and the Role of Monetary Policy” said the Fed’s own capital base could be wiped out “several times” once borrowing costs spike. It said trouble could compound at an alarming pace, with yields spiking up to double-digit rates by the late 2020s. By then the Fed will be forced to finance spending to avert the greater evil of default.

Then we had the minutes of the Federal Advisor Council arguing that it is “not clear” whether QE is really boosting the economy, while the toxic side-effects are all too clear. It warned of “unsustainable bubbles” in asset prices. It said zero rates are pushing pension funds underwater on their liabilities, and even claimed that QE may be causing firms to defer investment.

Since then the Bank for International Settlements has issued a full frontal attack on the credibility of QE, saying it “doesn’t work” and is doing more harm than good. Even the Boston Fed’s ultra-dove Eric Rosengren has talked of early tapering, a clear sign that the Fed’s centre of gravity has shifted.

Traders at some of the world's biggest banks manipulated benchmark foreign-exchange rates used to set the value of trillions of dollars of investments, according to five dealers with knowledge of the practice. Employees have been front-running client orders and rigging WM/Reuters rates by pushing through trades before and during the 60-second windows when the benchmarks are set, said the current and former traders, who requested anonymity because the practice is controversial.

Dealers colluded with counterparts to boost chances of moving the rates, said two of the people, who worked in the industry for a total of more than 20 years. This time the rates allegedly being rigged are in the foreign-exchange or "FX" markets, meaning that if this story is true, it would almost certainly trump LIBOR for scale/horribleness.

As one friend of mine who works on Wall Street put it, "It's endless! This is the biggest market in the world." Bloomberg suggested the story is just the tip of the iceberg.

This has enabled the US government to pile up an extraordinary amount of debt. During his tenure we have also seen mortgage rates fall to record lows. All of this has helped to spur economic activity in the short-term, but what happens when interest rates start going back to normal?

If the average rate of interest on US government debt rises to just 6 percent, the US government will suddenly be paying out a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt. And remember, there have been times in the past when the average rate of interest on US government debt has been much higher than that. In addition, when the US government starts having to pay more to borrow money so will everyone else.

What will that do to home sales and car sales? And of course we all remember what happened to adjustable rate mortgages when interest rates started to rise just prior to the last recession. We have gotten ourselves into a position where the US economy simply cannot afford for interest rates to go up. We have become addicted to the cheap money made available by a grossly distorted financial system, and we have Ben Bernanke to thank for that.

This will decisively change the character of China, where the Communist Party insisted for decades that most peasants, even those working in cities, remain tied to their tiny plots of land to ensure political and economic stability. Now, the party has shifted priorities, mainly to find a new source of growth for a slowing economy that depends increasingly on a consuming class of city dwellers.

The shift is occurring so quickly, and the potential costs are so high, that some fear rural China is once again the site of radical social engineering. Over the past decades, the Communist Party has flip-flopped on peasants’ rights to use land: giving small plots to farm during 1950s land reform, collectivizing a few years later, restoring rights at the start of the reform era and now trying to obliterate small landholders.

The leaders of eight of the world’s biggest economies all signed a 10-point Lough Erne Declaration that calls for tax authorities around the world to automatically share information. It also calls on countries to change rules that let multinational companies shift profits across borders to avoid taxes and require them to report “what tax they pay where”.

The marches, organized mostly through snowballing social media campaigns, blocked streets and halted traffic in more than a half-dozen cities, including Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Brasilia, where demonstrators climbed onto the roof of Brazil's Congress building and then stormed it.

Monday's demonstrations were the latest in a flurry of protests in the past two weeks that have added to growing unease over Brazil's sluggish economy, high inflation and a spurt in violent crime.

There is the deep rift between the Palestinian Fatah and Hamas factions that many recent reconciliation meetings have failed to resolve. And there is a cleavage within Israel over whether the two-state solution is desirable or even possible.

With Secretary of State John Kerry planning his fifth visit here in three months to revive peace talks, the Israeli divide was on stark display last week, as several right-wing ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government professed their profound opposition to a Palestinian state and promised to prevent one. While Mr Netanyahu distanced himself from the remarks, questions about the sincerity of his recent pleas for peace resurfaced. Clearly, a dissonance exists in Israeli public opinion, where a strong majority supports two states, but only along parameters the Palestinians have roundly rejected.

Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said there was a consensus in Israel favoring a Palestinian state, but not along the 1967 borders (as the Palestinian leadership insists); not with East Jerusalem as its capital (a cornerstone of every Palestinian plan); and not without maintaining an Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley (which Palestinians reject as a challenge to their sovereignty). Israelis have also become more vigilant about security and less trusting of so-called moderate Arab leaders in the wake of the Arab uprisings exploding around them.

Public expenditure was 49% of GDP in 2012, the OECD calculates, almost as much as Sweden’s 51.3%, and yet there is immense pressure for even greater amounts of spending, in the short as well as the longer term. The Office for Budget Responsibility has run various scenarios as part of its Fiscal Sustainability Report. Its central projection is that health spending will rise from 6.8% of GDP in 2016-17 to 9.1% by 2061-62 as the population ages. Even such a modest rise would devastate the public finances.

But new treatments, and the likelihood that productivity growth in the NHS will remain feeble, suggest that health’s share of national income could actually explode uncontrollably. Depending on the assumptions used, health spending could easily grab more than a 10th of national income – and quite possibly even a crippling 20-25% under extreme but plausible scenarios. This would sink the public finances and send the national debt to more than 350% of GDP.

Population ageing will have other consequences. State pension costs will increase from 5.6% of GDP to 8.3% by 2061-62.

Even with public sector pension costs falling a little, that represents a substantial increase. Social care spending is meant to increase from 1.1% of GDP to 2%; the final bill is likely to be even higher now that the Government is becoming involved.

None of this includes the cost of other major projects such as high-speed rail and energy investments to prevent the lights from going out. Wherever we look, there is immense, pent-up demand for higher spending; this will eventually prove irresistible to whoever is in power. No political party is telling the truth: sooner or later, the welfare state as we know it will become unsustainable – and keeping it on life support for as long as possible, trimming on the margins while taxing until the pips squeak will only plunge us into a vicious spiral of decline.

Mr Bernanke is also expected to reassure investors that the $85 billion a month bond buying scheme can be stepped up again, even after the brakes are applied, in an attempt to ease market concerns that America is about to embark on a total withdrawal from QE.

Markets have experienced an unusually volatile few weeks, following the Fed chairman's warning last month that it could start winding down the programme "in the next few meetings" if economic data continued to show that America was well on the road to recovery.

The spike in margin debt was rapidly followed by a horrifying stock market crash. Well guess what? It is happening again. In April (the last month we have a number for), margin debt rose to an all-time high of more than 384 billion dollars. The previous high was 381 billion dollars which occurred back in July 2007. Margin debt is about 29 percent higher than it was a year ago, and the S&P 500 has risen by more than 20 percent since last fall.

The stock market just continues to rise even though the underlying economic fundamentals continue to get worse. So should we be alarmed? Is the stock market bubble going to burst at some point? Well, if history is any indication we are in big trouble. In the past, whenever margin debt has gone over 2.25% of GDP the stock market has crashed. That certainly does not mean that the market is going to crash this week, but it is a major red flag.

Editors were asked not to publish information that may "jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel" in the warning issued on 7 June, a day after the Guardian first revealed details of the National Security Agency's (NSA) secret Prism programme.

The D notice, which was marked "private and confidential: not for publication, broadcast or use on social media", was made public on the Westminster gossip blog, Guido Fawkes. Although only advisory for editors, the self-censorship system is intended to prevent the media from making "inadvertent public disclosure of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations and methods".

The warning was issued by defence officials in the UK as the BBC, ITN, Sky News and other newspapers and broadcasters around the world covered the surveillance revelations disclosed by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The leaks, reported extensively in the Guardian and also the Washington Post, have made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a week.