Here's a pitiful story about a 49-year-old mother of six who tumbled off her chair in the psychiatric ER waiting room of Kings County Hospital, in New York City, and laid there for one hour without any medical care.

When she was finally brought into the emergency room, she was dead. An autopsy revealed she died from pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in the legs which traveled to her lungs.

Why was this woman waiting for so long while blood pooled in her legs? It seems there is increasing evidence that crowded ER's can be hazardous to your health because of their uncaring staff and their scheduling policies.

There has been an explosion of wait times in ER's in the past few years, even for those who are the sickest. One of the reasons is because of the practice of boarding inpatients in the emergency room until an impatient bed is available in a hospital room.

Another problem is boarding shifts ER resources away from the new patients in the waiting room. A recent study found those critically ill patients who board for more than six hours in the ER are 4 percent more likely to die.

You may ask, "why would any hospital promote such a practice?" It's the same answer I've used before in my articles about health issues. It is simply this, the bottom line profit is more important than the patient's welfare.

Here is why that is true. The patients in direct and transfer admissions are more likely to come with private insurance and need procedural care, both of which maximize profits. ER patients, who are more likely to be uninsured or have low paying Medicaid, are among this group.

This article should serve as a wake-up call to everyone that the conventional health care system is desperately in need of radial change.

Ten years ago it was concluded that properly prescribed and correctly taken pharmaceutical drugs were the fourth leading cause of death in North America.

Recently, John Hopkins Medical School refined this research and discovered that medical errors and prescription drugs may actually be the leading cause of death.

What has been found is a trend of health care cost rising, mistakes increasing, and pharmaceutical drug-induced side effects and deaths skyrocketing.

Surveys have also found that physicians, nurses and other health care workers rarely challenge a colleague when they see a mistake being made in patient care.

A previous study revealed researchers spent more than 10,000 hours observing and interviewing more than 2,000 health workers at 19 hospitals across America. What was most disturbing is the evidence they found:

* Doctors (84 percent), nurses and other health care providers (62 percent) have seen co-workers repeatedly take short cuts that could place patients in danger.

* Doctors (88 percent), nurses and other health care providers (48 percent) work with people who show poor clinical judgement.

* Fewer than 10 percent of doctors, nurses and other caregivers said they directly confront colleagues about their concerns. One fifth of those doctors have seen harm come to patients as a result of the behavior of those colleagues.

The complete and utter absence of compassion and care exhibited by the staff at this New York City psychiatric ER is truly chilling.

The American health care system is not designed to really care for anyone. As I have just stated, the system is designed to make huge profits without compassion for the patient. That has proven to be the truth more times than you would ever believe.

What is really sad is the fact that many diseases are preventable and the average person is not made aware of it. In the case of diabetes, like many other diseases, it's 100 percent treatable with fairly simple lifestyle changes, which virtually cost zero.

So if you want to make some wise choices about your overall health, then review your present lifestyle habits and see if they are as healthy as they should be. If they are not, make the necessary changes and you will become healthier. It's simple, try it.