Posted by
Rajjpuut's Folly on Saturday, September 12, 2009 4:52:54 AM
A typical large metropolitan hospital averages 50-60 medication mistakes each hour of the day. The large majority of them are caught pretty quickly. When someone, due to medical mistakes, dies, is injured or maimed or otherwise incapacitated it’s called an “iatrogenic” incident. The third leading cause of death in the United States is iatrogenic incidents: 250,000 in all. More than two million people are maimed, disabled, sickened or temporarily injured by iatrogenic incidents. These incidents occur a lot of different ways: mistakes during surgery, etc., but medication mistakes are high on the list; and drug incidents where NO medication mistakes occurred at all are even more common.
You are more likely, three times more likely, to die from negative effects of correct medicine prescribed for you by a doctor then from an automobile accident 106,000 die that way. You are ten times more likely to be taken to the hospital from an iatrogenic incident with correct medicine than from an automobile accident.
The Food and Drug Administration is directly responsible for those 106,000 deaths from negative effects of correctly prescribed drugs. They are also indirectly responsible for 7,000 other deaths from mistakenly administered-medications in hospitals and elsewhere. There is no good reason for medicine, even mistakenly prescribed or administered medicine to kill anyone unless A. They were in a mighty precarious state to begin with or B. An allergic reaction of some sort took place. IF, IF the FDA were required to abide by the common-sense medical dictate “First Do NO Harm!” at least 95% of those 113,000 would NOT die every year. Instead some FDA drugs have killed over 100,000 people in their history and keep right on killing today; and the legions of maimed and severely injured from some of those drugs climbs into the millions.
The worst aspect about all this, is that a whole lot of the medicines that do the most damage are palliative medicines that do NOT cure or fix anything. There is nothing wrong with easing patients’ symptoms, but that ease should NEVER come at the cost of endangering the patient’s health, which is the case in 100% of the drugs the FDA approves for palliative purposes. When, in actuality, many of these palliatives are no more effective than placebos (sugar pills) and great harm is possible and the medicines are expensive . . . look for the FDA to be behind this travesty. Medicines that actually cure something can kill or injure on sad occasions; but medicines that cannot cure should NEVER cause harm. This is one more reason why the FDA needs to be eliminated.
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
For those wondering about other iatrogenic deaths: 80,000 die from infections that are encountered while in the hospital; 45,000 from miscellaneous errors; and 12,000 from unnecessary surgeries.