Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Drug-related morbidity and mortality have been estimated to cost more that $136 billion a year in United States. ... 1 in 15.2 exposures is a problem]

Drugs & Doctors May be Leading Cause of Death | by Joseph Mercola, D.O. | Published 8/21/2004 | Pharmaceutical Industry News

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 ...
...
  • 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.
  • 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).

Healthsentinel.com

...

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."

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