Drugs and Doctors May be the Leading Cause of Death in U.S.

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Sun, 19 Feb 2006 10:47:26 -0500

[sSRI-Research] Drugs and Doctors May be the Leading Cause of

Death in U.S.

 

 

 

 

Drugs and Doctors May be the Leading Cause of Death in U.S.

http://mercola.com/2003/jan/15/doctors_drugs.htm

 

By Joseph Mercola, D.O.

 

 

 

At one time, the main title of my Web site read:

Doctors are the Third leading Cause of Death

 

Many of you reading this have read or seen this in many places other

than my

Web site. This article, available on my home page, was widely

circulated on

the Internet and was one of the reasons why my Web site was initially

popular. What you may not realize is that I am the one who made this

analysis and popularized it. The original study was published by Dr.

Starfield, a full professor of public health at the most prestigious

hospital in the United States, Johns Hopkins. Her study never had the

headline in it, but instead listed the published research documenting the

various causes of deaths that doctors contributed to. I simply added them

all up and compared them to cardiovascular diseases and cancer and came up

with the above headline, which was widely circulated on the Internet.

 

Interestingly, when I contacted Dr. Starfield by e-mail she disagreed with

the headline I had come up with. She did not feel that doctors were the

third leading cause of death, but thought they were the number one

cause of

death because of their failure to inform their patients about the truth of

health. Now this might be a bit too harsh as even if people understand

health truth they have freedom of choice and can choose to use sugar, soda

and drugs (legal and illegal) to compromise their health and longevity.

 

However, JAMA actually published a study a year earlier that could support

that doctors may be the leading cause of death in the United States.

 

This finding is more of a speculation though, so below I have provided

some

other studies to support this assertion.

 

In 1994, an estimated 2,216,000 (1,721,000 to 2,711,000) hospitalized

patients had serious adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and 106,000 (76,000 to

137,000) had fatal ADRs, making these reactions between the fourth and

sixth

leading cause of death.

 

Fatal ADRs accounted for 0.32 percent (95 percent confidence interval

(CI),

0.23 percent to 0.41 percent) of hospitalized patients.

 

JAMA April 15, 1998;279(15):1200-5

 

BMC Nephrol. December 22, 2003

Medication-related problems (MRP) continue to occur at a high rate in

ambulatory hemodialysis (HD) patients.

Medication-dosing problems (33.5 percent), adverse drug reactions (20.7

percent), and an indication that was not currently being treated (13.5

percent) were the most common MRP.

5,373 medication orders were reviewed and a MRP was identified every 15.2

medication exposures.

 

Nurs Times. December 9-15, 2003;99(49):24-5.

In 2002, 16,176 adverse drug reaction reports were received, of which 67

percent related to reactions categorized as 'serious.'

 

Pharm World Sci. December, 2003;25(6):264-8.

Medication administration errors (MAEs) were observed in two

departments of

a hospital for 20 days.

The medication administration error rate was 14.9 percent. Dose errors

were

the most frequent (41 percent) errors, followed by wrong time (26 percent)

and wrong rate errors. Ten percent of errors were estimated as potentially

life-threatening, 26 percent potentially significant and 64 percent

potentially minor.

 

Serious and Fatal Drug Reactions in US Hospitals

 

Drug-related morbidity and mortality have been estimated to cost more that

$136 billion a year in United States. These estimates are higher than the

total cost of cardiovascular care or diabetes care in the United States. A

major component of these costs is adverse drug reactions (ADE).

Am J Med August 1, 2000;109(2):122-30

 

About 0.05 percent of all hospital admissions were certainly or probably

drug-related.

Incidence figures based on death certificates only may seriously

underestimate the true incidence of fatal adverse drug reactions.

Eur J Clin Pharmacol October, 2002;58(7):479-82

 

In one study of 200 patients, ADRs may have contributed to the deaths

of two

(one percent) patients.

J Clin Pharm Ther October, 2000;25(5):355-61

 

In a survey of over 28,000 patients, ADRs were considered to be the

cause of

3.4 percent of hospital admissions. Of these, 187 ADRs were coded as

severe.

Gastrointestinal complaints (19 percent) represented the most common

events,

followed by metabolic and hemorrhagic complications (nine percent). The

drugs most frequently responsible for these ADRs were diuretics, calcium

channel blockers, nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs and digoxin.

J Am Geriatr Soc December, 2002;50(12):1962-8

 

 

 

Dr. Mercola's Comment

 

As health reporter Nick Regush said last year:

 

" There is no way to be nice about this. There is no point in raising false

hopes. There is no treatment or vaccine in sight. There is no miracle

breakthrough on the horizon.

 

Medicine, as we know it, is dying. It's entering a terminal phase.

 

What began as an acute illness reached the chronic stage about a

decade ago

and progression toward death has been remarkably swift and well beyond

anything one could have predicted.

 

The disease is caused by conflict of interest, tainted research, greed for

big bucks, pretentious doctors and scientists, lying, cheating,

invasion by

the morally bankrupt marketing automatons of the drug industry, derelict

politicians and federal and state regulators - all seasoned with huge

doses

of self-importance and foul odor. "

 

Currently, the United States spends about 1.5 trillion dollars for

healthcare, and the projections are that it will double in less than 10

years.

The sad tragedy is that we are spending all of this money on disease

management focused on drugs and surgery, and our return on this investment

is profoundly poor. More and more people do not have the energy they

need to

get through the day while millions of others are suffering with painful

crippling diseases because they have violated basic health principles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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