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http://www.health-care-reform.net/causedeath.htm

106,000 deaths per year due to negative effects of drugs

Not so fun stuff.

225,000 deaths per year.

Isn't it great we passed tart reform. Otherwise all those victims families would be suing for malpractice and getting lots of cash.

Most of those people will be old and/or ill to begin with. Things that kill young people are far more worrying.

Its almost as if people expect healthcare to be 100% effective 100% of the time. Also, how is that doctors? Wouldn't big-pharma be more to blame with all their drug trial shenanigans?

225,000 deaths. Preventable deaths.

Should we ban doctors?

Being a doctor is a stressful job.

And BTW, most of the time it isn't the doctor thats actually giving the drugs/measuring. Alot of that is done by Nurses, except for stuff that only a licensed doctor can do.

 LordofHats wrote:
Its almost as if people expect healthcare to be 100% effective 100% of the time. Also, how is that doctors? Wouldn't big-pharma be more to blame with all their drug trial shenanigans?

Yes, it would.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Being a doctor is a stressful job.

And BTW, most of the time it isn't the doctor thats actually giving the drugs/measuring. Alot of that is done by Nurses, except for stuff that only a licensed doctor can do.

Yup. Nurses are human beings, they feth up. That's the world.

Yup, all the doctor does is say how much of what to give them 99% of the time.

Now I suppose they could miss a decimal points from time to time, but I think most of those errors would happen when actually filling and administering the medicine.

We passed tort reform???

Anyhoo... yeah, this is serious and it happens everywhere.

In the Pharmacy world... pharmacist are more engaged with patient care...

Kids... if you're at school or going to school soon... don't get an MD... go for the Rph. You'll make loads of $$$ without the crap that MDs deals with...

Thus, America's healthcare-system-induced deaths are the third leading cause of the death in the U.S., after heart disease and cancer.

The title is wrong...

More like "Negligent Nurses and Pharmacists are third leading cause of death"

 Grey Templar wrote:
More like "Negligent Nurses and Pharmacists are third leading cause of death"

I was just quoting the article, it doesn't say doctors, it says its health-care-system-related-deaths or whatever.

My dad is a pharmacist and he's told me all about the asshattery that goes on in hospitals. Pharmacists (the higher up ones, anyway) go on regular rounds to see patients too, and they often do do the prescribing (hehe, I said do do). That said, my dad has caught all kinds of faulty prescriptions from doctors, incorrect dosages given by nurses, etc etc. He's like the Hank Hill of pharmacy-knows his job inside and out, and sees people as people, not numbers. Doctors and pharmacists do have stressful lives. Go hug one. I would, but I just visited him last weekend and gave him a hug when I left to come home-so I'm set for a few more weeks.

feeder wrote:
225,000 deaths. Preventable deaths.

Should we ban doctors?

Not all deaths are preventable. The entire industry of medicine is there to give people who become ill a few more years, and many of those deaths will be caused by reactions to drugs that couldn't be predicted, such as undiagnosed allergies.

Also that article is from 12 years ago. We have no way of telling whether the situation is similar at the moment.

Sounds like you could use some kind of national health service to get things sorted out

When people can't afford preventable healthcare and wait to see the doctor until they are really sick you get results like this.

There is also a reason we call it "practicing" medicine.

While I'm sure that there are negligent nurses, it is also part of their job to point out to the doctors when some drugs will interact poorly with each other. If they have doubt they are supposed to double check with the pharmacy.


Sometimes, this may not be anyone's fault, as if you are a conscious patient, you're supposed to fill out forms and whatnot, listing what drugs you are allergic to. Sometimes things DO slip through the cracks, but from all the nurses that I know, they don't typically become negligent, they genuinely do care about their patients, whoever they may be.

Negligence is a factor, but then so is simple drug interactions, drugs commonly make other drugs more or less effective or excacerbate side effects
I would assume that many of these deaths were in elderely or otherwise extremely sick individuals who would be particularly prone to these effects (and to be honest may well have died anyway).

Medicine is extremely complex and to be honest a lot of diseases are poorly understood which means that medical care will fail and in some cases it may even worsen the patients condition. That is simply the nature of the beast.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 SilverMK2 wrote:
Sounds like you could use some kind of national health service to get things sorted out

Communist!

D-USA. If I remember correctly your in the medical field. Do you think a good chunk of the deaths can be atributed to "Staff infection" to the numbers?

 Jihadin wrote:
D-USA. If I remember correctly your in the medical field. Do you think a good chunk of the deaths can be atributed to "Staff infection" to the numbers?

These numbers are drawn directly from medication related deaths reported by the linked article. A quick google search gave the number of deaths from hospital aquired infections in the US at just under 100k in 2002. HAIs are difficult as while some of them are due to lax hygiene or negligence/ignorance the fact is that people in hospitals are sick and in a fairly confined indoor space. Hospital in-patients even have different populations of bacteria that colonise them compared to the 'well' population,many of whom are pathogenic. There is only so much that you can do without putting each and every patient in isolation so infections are all but inevitable.

Obviously the more preventative measures and training that is undertaken the better but HAI will always be a concern

 SilverMK2 wrote:
Sounds like you could use some kind of national health service to get things sorted out

Canada has about the same population to deaths ratio that the US has. So much for that theory.

http://theconference.ca/facts-on-prescription-drug-deaths-and-the-drug-industry

And that's from 2011.

Article from May 2012 shows Britain isn't the best with this either.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2138193/GP-drug-blunders-hit-40-elderly-Patients-given-unnecessary-pills-wrong-doses.html

djones520 wrote:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2138193/GP-drug-blunders-hit-40-elderly-Patients-given-unnecessary-pills-wrong-doses.html

I would be extremely wary of taking anything in the Daily Mail at face value, they are about as objective as Fox News. Thats not to say that the UK doesn't have a problem with this, it is effectively global.

Palindrome wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
D-USA. If I remember correctly your in the medical field. Do you think a good chunk of the deaths can be atributed to "Staff infection" to the numbers?

These numbers are drawn directly from medication related deaths reported by the linked article. A quick google search gave the number of deaths from hospital aquired infections in the US at just under 100k in 2002. HAIs are difficult as while some of them are due to lax hygiene or negligence/ignorance the fact is that people in hospitals are sick and in a fairly confined indoor space. Hospital in-patients even have different populations of bacteria that colonise them compared to the 'well' population,many of whom are pathogenic. There is only so much that you can do without putting each and every patient in isolation so infections are all but inevitable.

Obviously the more preventative measures and training that is undertaken the better but HAI will always be a concern

HAI's are always a concern, but they ere most likely not the main factor.

Polypharmacy makes taking care of people harder since you can have more interactions just based on the sheer numbers of pills people take. It also makes it hard to figure out with medicines you can hold or switch because so many of the medicines are prescribed for "off-label" uses by the doctors. You also have hospitals that have their own formularies so a patient who has been on the same meds for years will suddenly be on different medications because it will save the hospital some cash.

I do think that a big contributing factor is that people seem so much sicker by the time they come to the hospital now because they waited until the last minute due to lack of insurance or they had insurance who kicks them out of the hospital too early.

I know people are always worried about "rationed care" with the ACA, but insurance companies are already doing that, and by extension the hospitals are rationing it some more.

Having worked in both for-profit and non-profit hospitals I honestly have a very bitter taste for our medical system. I truly and honestly feel the the VA Hospital System is the best place I have worked so far.

Infection Control is a big deal...

I agree with D-USA has said...

In my opinion... I also think that hospital/doctors are very averse to litigation which creates an overtly aggressive environment for treatment. I work with Pharmacists who routinely find issues with newly prescribed orders based on the current patient's profile.

But, from what I understand... that's pretty normal in most of the western HealthCare (we have a lot of immigrants).

 whembly wrote:

But, from what I understand... that's pretty normal in most of the western HealthCare (we have a lot of immigrants).

What on earth does Immigration have to do with this?

Palindrome wrote:

 whembly wrote:

But, from what I understand... that's pretty normal in most of the western HealthCare (we have a lot of immigrants).

What on earth does Immigration have to do with this?

I've worked with Pharmacist who trained in Europe, India, Japan... ya know, outside of US.

I was curious how "different" we are here vs. what they've seen at home. I suspected we were vastly different and according to them, we're not... yes, its antecedal...

 whembly wrote:

I've worked with Pharmacist who trained in Europe, India, Japan... ya know, outside of US.

I was curious how "different" we are here vs. what they've seen at home. I suspected we were vastly different and according to them, we're not... yes, its antecedal...

If there is an issue with standards then the onus is on the recruitment and training requirements of your own medical establishments.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 d-usa wrote:

HAI's are always a concern, but they ere most likely not the main factor.

They aren't a factor at all as the quoted figure is purely deaths due to drug interactions (I do wonder as to how this figure was derived though).

I was speaking in terms of hospital deaths in general, not just from drugs.