Modern Health Care System is the Leading Cause of Death, Part II

Forwarded message from fidyl@yahoo.com

[ Subject: Modern Health Care System is the Leading Cause of Death, Part
 II
[ From: fidyl@yahoo.com
[ Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004

Modern Health Care System is the Leading Cause of Death, Part II

By Gary Null PhD, Carolyn Dean MD ND, Martin Feldman MD,
Debora Rasio MD, Dorothy Smith PhD

http://www.mercola.com/2004/jul/10/healthcare_death.htm

Drug Iatrogenesis

Drugs comprise the major treatment modality of scientific
medicine. With the discovery of the "Germ Theory" medical
scientists convinced the public that infectious organisms
were the cause of illness. Finding the "cure" for these
infections proved much harder than anyone imagined. From
the beginning, chemical drugs promised much more than
they delivered. But far beyond not working, the drugs
also caused incalculable side effects. The drugs
themselves, even when properly prescribed, have side
effects that can be fatal, as Lazarou's study1 shows. But
human error can make the situation even worse.

Medication Errors

A survey of a 1992 national pharmacy database found a
total of 429,827 medication errors from 1,081 hospitals.
Medication errors occurred in 5.22 percent of patients
admitted to these hospitals each year. The authors
concluded that a minimum of 90,895 patients annually were
harmed by medication errors in the country as a whole.37

A 2002 study shows that 20 percent of hospital
medications for patients had dosage mistakes. Nearly 40
percent of these errors were considered potentially
harmful to the patient. In a typical 300-patient hospital
the number of errors per day were 40.38

Problems involving patients' medications were even higher
the following year. The error rate intercepted by
pharmacists in this study was 24 percent, making the
potential minimum number of patients harmed by
prescription drugs 417,908.39

Recent Adverse Drug Reactions

More recent studies on adverse drug reactions show that
the figures from 1994 (published in Lazarou's 1998 JAMA
article) may be increasing. A 2003 study followed 400
patients after discharge from a tertiary care hospital
(hospital care that requires highly specialized skills,
technology or support services). Seventy-six patients (19
percent) had adverse events. Adverse drug events were the
most common at 66 percent. The next most common events
were procedure-related injuries at 17 percent.40

In a NEJM study an alarming one-in-four patients suffered
observable side effects from the more than 3.34 billion
prescription drugs filled in 2002.41 One of the doctors
who produced the study was interviewed by Reuters and
commented that:

"With these 10-minute appointments, it's hard for the
doctor to get into whether the symptoms are bothering the
patients."42

William Tierney, who editorialized on the NEJM study,
said

".. given the increasing number of powerful drugs
available to care for the aging population, the problem
will only get worse."

The drugs with the worst record of side effects were the
SSRIs, the NSAIDs, and calcium-channel blockers. Reuters
also reported that prior research has suggested that
nearly 5 percent of hospital admissions--over 1 million
per year--are the result of drug side effects. But most
of the cases are not documented as such. The study found
one of the reasons for this failure: in nearly two-thirds
of the cases, doctors couldn't diagnose drug side effects
or the side effects persisted because the doctor failed
to heed the warning signs.

Medicating Our Feelings

We only need to look at the side effects of
antidepressant drugs, which give hope to a depressed
population. Patients seeking a more joyful existence and
relief from worry, stress and anxiety, fall victim to the
messages blatantly displayed on TV and billboards. Often,
instead of relief, they also fall victim to a myriad of
iatrogenic side effects of antidepressant medication.

Also, a whole generation of antidepressant users has
resulted from young people growing up on Ritalin.
Medicating youth and modifying their emotions must have
some impact on how they learn to deal with their
feelings. They learn to equate coping with drugs and not
their inner resources. As adults, these medicated youth
reach for alcohol, drugs, or even street drugs, to cope.

According to the Journal of the American Medical
Association, "Ritalin acts much like cocaine."43 Today's
marketing of mood-modifying drugs, such as Prozac or
Zoloft, makes them not only socially acceptable but
almost a necessity in today's stressful world.

Television Diagnosis

In order to reach the widest audience possible, drug
companies are no longer just targeting medical doctors
with their message about antidepressants. By 1995 drug
companies had tripled the amount of money allotted to
direct advertising of prescription drugs to consumers.
The majority of the money is spent on seductive
television ads. From 1996 to 2000, spending rose from
$791 million to nearly $2.5 billion.44 Even though $2.5
billion may seem like a lot of money, the authors comment
that it only represents 15 percent of the total
pharmaceutical advertising budget.

According to medical experts "there is no solid evidence
on the appropriateness of prescribing that results from
consumers requesting an advertised drug." However, the
drug companies maintain that direct-to-consumer
advertising is educational. Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe, of the
Public Citizen Health Research Group in Washington, D.C.,
argues that the public is often misinformed about these
ads.45

People want what they see on television and are told to
go to their doctor for a prescription.

Doctors in private practice either acquiesce to their
patients' demands for these drugs or spend valuable
clinic time trying to talk patients out of unnecessary
drugs. Dr. Wolfe remarks that one important study found
that people mistakenly believe that the "FDA reviews all
ads before they are released and allows only the safest
and most effective drugs to be promoted directly to the
public."46

How Do We Know Drugs Are Safe?

Another aspect of scientific medicine that the public
takes for granted is the testing of new drugs. Unlike the
class of people that take drugs who are ill and need
medication, in general, drugs are tested on individuals
who are fairly healthy and not on other medications that
can interfere with findings. But when they are declared
"safe" and enter the drug prescription books, they are
naturally going to be used by people on a variety of
other medications and who also have a lot of other health
problems.

Then, a new Phase of drug testing called Post-Approval
comes into play, which is the documentation of side
effects once drugs hit the market. In one very telling
report, the General Accounting Office (an agency of the
U.S. Government) "found that of the 198 drugs approved by
the FDA between 1976 and 1985 .. 102 (or 51.5 percent)
had serious post-approval risks .. the serious post-
approval risks (included) heart failure, myocardial
infarction, anaphylaxis, respiratory depression and
arrest, seizures, kidney and liver failure, severe blood
disorders, birth defects and fetal toxicity, and
blindness."47

The investigative show NBC's "Dateline" wondered if your
doctor is moonlighting as a drug rep. After a year-long
investigation they reported that because doctors can
legally prescribe any drug to any patient for any
condition, drug companies heavily promote "off-label" and
frequently inappropriate and non-tested uses of these
medications in spite of the fact that these drugs are
only approved for specific indications they have been
tested for.48

The leading causes of adverse drug reactions are:

Antibiotics (17 percent) Cardiovascular drugs (17
percent) Chemotherapy (15 percent) Analgesics and anti-
inflammatory agents (15 percent) 49 Specific Drug
Iatrogenesis: Antibiotics

Dr. Egger, in a recent editorial, wrote that after 50
years of increasing use of antibiotics, 30 million pounds
of antibiotics are used in America per year.50 Twenty-
five million pounds of this total are used in animal
husbandry. The vast majority of this amount, 23 million
pounds, is used to try to prevent disease, the stress of
shipping, and to promote growth. Only 2 million pounds
are given for specific animal infections.

Dr. Egger reminds us that low concentrations of
antibiotics are measurable in many of our foods, rivers,
and streams around the world. Much of this is seeping
into bodies of water from animal farms.

Egger says overuse of antibiotics results in food-borne
infections resistant to antibiotics. Salmonella is found
in 20 percent of ground meat but constant exposure of
cattle to antibiotics has made 84 percent of salmonella
resistant to at least one anti-salmonella antibiotic.
Diseased animal food accounts for 80 percent of
salmonellosis in humans, or 1.4 million cases per year.

The conventional approach to dealing with this epidemic
is to radiate food to try to kill all organisms but keep
using the antibiotics that cause the original problem.
Approximately 20 percent of chickens are contaminated
with Campylobacter jejuni causing 2.4 million human cases
of illness annually. Fifty-four percent of these
organisms are resistant to at least one anti-
campylobacter antimicrobial.

A ban on growth-promoting antibiotics in Denmark began in
1999, which led to a decrease from 453,200 pounds to
195,800 pounds within a year. Another report from
Scandinavia found that taking away antibiotic growth
promoters had no or minimal effect on food production
costs. Egger further warns that in America the current
crowded, unsanitary methods of animal farming support
constant stress and infection, and are geared toward high
antibiotic use. He says these conditions would have to be
changed along with cutting back on antibiotic use.

In America, over 3 million pounds of antibiotics are used
every year on humans. With a population of 284 million
Americans, this amount is enough to give every man, woman
and child 10 teaspoons of pure antibiotics per year.
Egger says that exposure to a steady stream of
antibiotics has altered pathogens such as Streptococcus
pneumoniae, Staplococcus aureus, and entercocci, to name
a few.

Almost half of patients with upper respiratory tract
infections in the United States still receive antibiotics
from their doctor.51 According to the CDC, 90 percent of
upper respiratory infections are viral and should not be
treated with antibiotics. In Germany the prevalence for
systemic antibiotic use in children aged 0 to 6 years was
42.9 percent.52

Data taken from nine U.S. health plans between 1996 and
2000 on antibiotic use in 25,000 children found that
rates of antibiotic use decreased. Antibiotic use in
children, aged 3 months to under 3 years, decreased 24
percent, from 2.46 to 1.89 antibiotic prescriptions
per/patient per/year. For children, 3 years to under 6
years, there was a 25 percent reduction from 1.47 to 1.09
antibiotic prescriptions per/patient per/year. And for
children aged 6 to under 18 years, there was a 16 percent
reduction from 0.85 to 0.69 antibiotic prescriptions
per/patient /per year.53 Although there was a reduction
in antibiotic use, the data indicate that on average
every child in America receives 1.22 antibiotic
prescriptions annually.

Group A beta-hemolytic streptococci is the only common
cause of sore throat that requires antibiotics,
penicillin and erythromycin being the only recommended
treatment. However, 90 percent of sore throats are viral.
The authors of this study estimated there were 6.7
million adult annual visits for sore throat between 1989
and 1999 in the United States. Antibiotics were used in
73 percent of visits. Furthermore, patients treated with
antibiotics were given non-recommended broad-spectrum
antibiotics in 68 percent of visits.

The authors noted, that from 1989 to 1999, there was a
significant increase in the newer and more expensive
broad-spectrum antibiotics and a decrease in use of
penicillin and erythromycin, which are the recommended
antibiotics.54 If antibiotics were given in 73 percent of
visits and should have only been given in 10 percent,
this represents 63 percent, or a total of 4.2 million
visits for sore throat that ended in unnecessary
antibiotic prescriptions between1989 and 1999. In 1995,
Dr. Besser and the CDC cited 2003 cited much higher
figures of 20 million unnecessary antibiotic
prescriptions per year for viral infections.2 Neither of
these figures takes into account the number of
unnecessary antibiotics used for non-fatal conditions
such as acne, intestinal infection, skin infections, ear
infections, etc.

Read Part 1 here:

http://www.mercola.com/2004/jul/7/healthcare_death.htm

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