Thanks to the popularity of open access and its pay-to-publish mentality, surveys by Adjunct Associate Professors in Health Services can be called medical articles.
A survey of 2,000 households across Iraq was used to estimate death rates for the two year-period before the war began in March 2003 and the subsequent years until mid-2011 - the result: 500,000 people dead.
It's not as ridiculous as the one million death claims of anti-war activists when they were campaigning in 2006 and 2008, but still far more than estimates by virtually everyone else. The paper in open access publisher PLOS Medicine lumps in 'indirectly attributable' deaths but acknowledges that estimates that extrapolate from a small number of reported deaths to the entire population are not reliable. They say they attempted to account for this and in doing so, came up with a range between 48,000 and 751,000.
So if you have a number, throw it out there. But look for the mainstream media to claim 500,000.
All the previous estimates were also controversial and their methodologies have been criticized by scientists and politicians. The survey by Amy Hagopian of the University of Washington concluded that the wartime crude death rate in Iraq was more than 50% higher than the death rate during the two-year period preceding the war. In other words, nearly 50% more people died getting rid of a sociopath who had been killing an alarming number of his people for decades
Based on those rates, the researchers estimate the total excess Iraqi deaths attributable to the war through mid-2011 to be about 405,000. They also estimated that an additional 56,000 deaths were not counted due to migration. Including this number, their final estimate is that close to half a million people died in Iraq as a result of the war and subsequent occupation from March 2003 to June 2011.
The risk of death at the peak of the conflict in 2006 almost tripled for men and rose by 70% for women. Violent deaths were attributed primarily to coalition forces (35%) and militia (32%). The majority (63%) of violent deaths were from gunshots. Car bombs accounted for 12%.