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There were 1.3 million visits to the emergency room last year as the result of adverse effects to prescription medications. The first thing the doctor on the show said is that doctors absolutely over-prescribe medications.
The thing is, that some medications are "overprescribed," and that too many people encounter averse side effects which might have been avoided or mitigated, is not an indictment of prescription medications themselves, nor necessarily the processes used to produce the pharmaceuticals. There are many factors that go into this. Just to name a few:
In the US prescription drugs can be advertised freely in all media. This gets patients requesting drugs from docs, sometimes even "doctor shopping" to get the meds they have already decided they want. While it'd be ideal if docs didn't let this influence them, it does.
People do not take drugs as directed, and/or take them in combination with other substances that have interactions. Sometimes interactions are the doc's slip-up, but often patients don't report all their meds/drugs/etc. to all docs, especially OTC meds, illegal substances, alcohol, birth control, supplements, and other things they may not consider "drugs" or may be ashamed of consuming.
Because society is increasingly mobile, and because so many people lack health insurance or have poor health insurance, there's a lot of doctor hopping, using the ER for health care, and the like, rather than sticking with one provider with complete patient records. Therefore the prescribing doc is less likely to be familiar with a patient's full history, issues, family background, etc.
Many people don't have the luxury of recovery time from various ailments - they need to be back on their feet and at work. There may be no one to take over child care, or look after a person who is recuperating. Stress exacerbates issues and slows healing as well. This can result in more aggressive medicating, longer courses of medication, and less resilient bodies.
Patients often find it difficult to address health issues through lifestyle changes, which increases rates of medication consumption.
People are living longer. They are also surviving injuries and illnesses they might not have in years past, but which can leave them with chronic conditions.
There is less aftercare, and less time spent in hospital, so patients started on meds and released get less professional monitoring.
These are big picture issues, not just "ugh, big pharma and doctors are pushing pills," and IMO we need big picture solutions. It's not just the health care system at play, it's larger economic and social challenges, too.
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Originally Posted by jaminhealth
I choose to believe
I noticed.
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Originally Posted by Frostnip
Let's turn it around, jaminhealth. You ask why pharmaceutical companies won't produce drugs without side effects. How do you suggest they do so? Let's take a common, very well understood, comparatively straightforward class of drugs with a straightforward side effect, and you explain how the drugs could be modified to remove the side effect.
It's common for antibiotics to cause digestive upset, because while killing the bacteria causing the illness, they also wipe out "good" bacteria in the gut. How would you make an antibiotic only kill bacteria causing illness, without killing beneficial bacteria?
(A complication: bear in mind that some bacteria can be both beneficial and harmful in the body, depending on where they're proliferating and in what quantity, such as escherichia coli.)
"Drugs" were developed because the herbs did not cure.
Many drugs do originally have plant sources and there are researchers who look for more.
If I needed digitalis, I would prefer to get it in a standardized dose than from bits and pieces of foxglove plant.
You are ignoring history.
If herbs did not work there would be no human race. We'd have all been dead 1000X over.
Stop ignoring history and LOOK into how medical schools came about, who funded them , why they were so THREATENED by natural cures that they had to eliminate them. You don't know your history. People did not want western medicine. They avoided it at all costs until the industry essentially drove home remedies to the background.
If it's one thing I've learned along the way, most older doctors and nurses use folk medicine/herbs/supplements for themselves. Why? Two reasons: Because they work without harming the body, and because they have spent 20+ years watching what medications due to patients.
How many deaths directly attributed to supplement use or illegal drug use? Much. much less. Supplement use you can count on one hand and illegal drug overdoses clock in at about 30,000 a year.Prescription drugs cause more deaths when used PROPERLY.
I don't understand. What testing??? How does breast cancer testing promote cancer? Are you implying that mammograms promote cancer? One low dose focused beam mammogram per year? It may be the only exposure to medical radiation any one woman receives in an entire year. That is negligible.
One reason society "sees" more breast cancer is an artifact of reporting. More and more are found early (so more patients are living with it, talking about it, getting treated for it before the desperate end stages), more accurately diagnosed and actively treated (again so more patients exist statistically), and found as an eventual cause of death. More death certificates actually state that the person died from cancer. That was not always true in the past. Cancer had a stigma so was not discussed. I'm sure the odds of developing various cancers have also grown, but its important to understand the role that recordkeeping plays.
Every time a needle biopsy is done, it move cells around, which can promote new cancer growth. Mammograms have a 60% false positive rate. So a women who does not have breast cancer can get diagnosed with breast cancer, get radiation/chemo and THEN get secondary cancers from the treatment. So she gets cancer even though she was perfectly healthy to begin with.
Most people die from the treatment of cancer than the cancer itself. That means, that yes, they would have died from cancer eventually. But the combo of surgery/chemo/radiation kills them quicker.
Think about it.
1 Shock the body with trauma (surgery),
2 followed by severely immunosupressive drugs that do not allow it to heal and invite all bacteria and viruses in, backstage pass no blockers, get the person sick as possible with all sorts of infections
3 add in the vomiting that chemo causes so no food can be digested for strength to fight off pathogens,
4 then radiate, which causes secondary cancer (that's why everyone always leaves the room)
That's why the survival rate is clocked at 5 years after diagnoses. They KNOW after five years, people start dying. It's shocking to me that people still don't question this process.
There are 100,000+ deaths EVERY YEAR from properly used, properly prescribed and properly taken medications. Dead. People DEAD.
Yes. The topic is about how to we reduce that number, not ignore it, not blame the victims. But for the grace of God, you weren't that 1 in 1000th patient that ended up in the ER.
We're not talking about people who get headaches or dizzy from a medication, if that happens, they can stop taking it and decide what to do instead.
This is about people dying or nearly dying because they took a prescribed med as directed by their doctor and went into cardiac arrest, anaphylaxis, stroke, blood clot, paralysis, suicidal, etc.
Every time a needle biopsy is done, it move cells around, which can promote new cancer growth. Mammograms have a 60% false positive rate. So a women who does not have breast cancer can get diagnosed with breast cancer, get radiation/chemo and THEN get secondary cancers from the treatment. So she gets cancer even though she was perfectly healthy to begin with.
This doesn't follow. Someone doesn't get a breast cancer diagnosis solely based on a mammogram, let alone have an aggressive course of treatment assigned. So if the mammogram is a false positive, and they get the needle biopsy, the biopsy has no cancer to "seed," so no harm no foul, other than an unnecessary jab. Or are you saying needle biopsies cause cancer where there were never any cancerous cells in the first place? I've never heard that floated even as a crackpot theory.
In any case, it's very rare for a biopsy to exacerbate the situation even when there is a situation to exacerbate. And ignoring the lump won't make it go away if it's cancerous, making a biopsy necessary even if there is some risk, so if you have some practical alternative suggestion for how to diagnose whether breast lumps are cancerous, I'm sure researchers would love to hear it.
OBJECTIVE: To estimate the incidence of serious and fatal adverse drug reactions (ADR) in hospital patients.
DATA SOURCES: Four electronic databases were searched from 1966 to 1996.
<snip>
CONCLUSIONS: The incidence of serious and fatal ADRs in US hospitals was found to be extremely high. While our results must be viewed with circumspection because of heterogeneity among studies and small biases in the samples, these data nevertheless suggest that ADRs represent an important clinical issue.
Bolding mine. Not saying adverse drug reactions aren't a pressing problem, but I'm not sure electronic database stats from twenty years ago are the most meaningful, let alone from fifty years ago. I'd be interested to see something more recent, and more rigorous.
I would note that fatal adverse drug reactions can include things like allergic reactions and other routine, if severe, issues which are often manageable if prompt care is provided.
The study does not appear to take into account whether any portion of fatal adverse reactions were in an already terminally ill patients, either (e.g. a patient dying of side effects from last-ditch cancer treatment for a likely fatal cancer), which to me is a rather relevant detail. To oversimplify, if I have X disease which has a 98% chance of killing me if left untreated, and the only currently available course of treatment has a 30% chance of killing me, and I choose treatment and die of it, that is lamentable and certainly a reason to push for research into more effective treatments, but I'm not sure it's fair to attribute my death to the treatment, even if the treatment is specifically what finished me off and what's listed on the death certificate.
I'm not sure you understand what medicine is. But based on previous posts I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
If jamin wants to avoid all medicines with side effects, she can always try to pray the illness away. It has a 0% proven success rate. But then again, she won't be contributing to big pharma's greed and won't take any risk from possible medication interactions/problems. Taking medication is a personal decision. Does the person want to risk living with the disease that causes pain/further illness/death?
Why so obsessed with pharmaceutical companies making a profit? Their profits/lack thereof are part of a bigger issue: our messed up healthcare system. But people don't understand it costs BILLIONS of dollars to even get a drug to market. There is extensive health testing involved: scientific experiments with bacteria, viruses, fungi, etc, followed by multiple animal trials, human trials, ethics committee hearings, approval (or not) by the FDA, etc. It's not just one test, one month, and done. I don't understand why drug companies are so demonized. We live in a capitalistic society. We can't have a double standard where Walmart deserves to make a profit but hospitals and other healthcare entities shouldn't. Even drug companies deserve to make a profit.
Last edited by Scooby Snacks; 08-04-2017 at 08:25 AM..
How many deaths directly attributed to supplement use or illegal drug use? Much. much less. Supplement use you can count on one hand and illegal drug overdoses clock in at about 30,000 a year.Prescription drugs cause more deaths when used PROPERLY.
I would attribute that to the underlying condition more than the medication. If you have some one taking a blood thinner due to blood clots and then has complications from that condition
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