My wife Briggs would still be alive if not for all the harm that was done to her during her treatment. We'd begun turning around her cancer ourselves when I lost her to medical errors in what was meant to be a short emergency hospital stay.

I wrote a book in her memory, incorporating notes she'd made to help other patients and carers, "Briggs: Love, Cancer, and the Medical Profession". A study in the British Medical Journal confirmed one of my chapter titles, that medical errors are the third-leading cause of death in the U.S.

I took the photo above very early in the morning, before a revision surgery. The previous operation had failed because a premier surgeon at one of the foremost cancer centres in Manhattan, if not the world, hadn't followed what I later discovered was standard procedure. Briggs, always managing to smile, was just happy that a nurse had brought her a warmed blanket.
 
A retired nurse wrote in a review of the book, "We need this type of information long before something happens because in the throes of it one becomes so drained they cannot decide which way to go!!" 

A doctor in Mumbai called it "a major eye opener." He messaged me separately that it overturned his approach to medicine. He gave an example of saving a boy's life by intervening with a colleague. He now always checks side effects against a patient's history before prescribing anything.

I quote a Harvard professor's estimate that 90-99 percent of side effects go unreported. The FDA relies on those reports to determine the ongoing safety of a drug once it's on the market. The side effects of an anti-anemia drug Briggs was given just one time put her in the hospital for 30 days. I later discovered there'd been a Congressional hearing on the safety of that type of drug. Briggs had almost died even after the paramedics came.

I cite a study co-funded by the National Cancer Institute, led by the University of California, San Francisco. Depending on the facility, it found that CT scans can deliver up to a massive 13 times their already-high base radiation.

I give dozens more examples in the book. 35 stars, legends, and professors have signed my related, primary petition, the Petition for Briggs for Curative Immunotherapies for All. Two of the professors won the Nobel Prize for their advances in immunotherapy, one of which led to Jimmy Carter's stage IV melanoma being put into remission. Immunotherapy has even now worked in terminal breast cancer. It can begin ending harm from radiation, chemotherapy, and failed surgeries as well as significantly reducing hospitalizations, during which so many (too-often lethal) infections occur.

Join me in calling for a new era in medical care and cancer treatment. We need standardized procedures across specialties, including with oversight, and that among other things curb the profit motive. A new approach to the approval and dispensing of drugs. Far more analysis of their effectiveness and safety compared with well-documented natural alternatives. Manadatory reporting of adverse events. Patients and caregivers being given crucial, comprehensive information, including conflicts of interest.

From the medical professionals' side, that includes eliminating exhaustion due to overlong shifts routinely worked in hospitals and addressing such issues as in a recent study in the Annals of Internal Medicine. With the U.S.'s multiple insurer system, it found that for every hour physicians see patients, they need to spend almost two additional hours on paperwork.

This petition is meant to begin the conversation in earnest.

Thanks for signing,

Paul