Medical Pharmacy

what can we do to change adverse drug reactions being 6th – 4th biggest cause of death in USA?

January 30th, 2010 | by admin |

what can be done to prevent death from adverse drug reactions?
Quote from BMJ http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ar…

"When a drug is marketed little is known about its safety in clinical use because only about 1500 patients are likely to have been exposed to it. Thus drug safety assessment should be considered an integral part of everyday clinical practice since detection and diagnosis often depend on clinical acumen."

From JAMA
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/reprin…

Incidence of Adverse Drug Reactions
in Hospitalized Patients:
Showed over 2 million hospital admissions and over 100000 deaths from adverse drug reactions.

This makes ADR’s the 6th – 4th biggest killer in the USA.

I’d like to open this to serious discussion and maybe a forum. What can be done to improve the safet of drugs and who prescribe them?
###It’d be nice if further testing were mandatory.###
I think it should be independent. currently Medical companies can hire people to do tests for them and release the results. This is like hiring an independent tax inspector

##But people are so eager to get pumped full of medicine. Then, when they found out that medicine could have killed them, and made them ill, they want to sue.## why are companies releasing medicine that they don’t know is safe? I’m sorry but your argument doesn’t hold water. Before a drug is released it should be established as safe.
###The pharmecutical companies are constantly being sued. That definitley doesn’t help with the cost of meds.### Maybe they wouldn’t get sued if the products were safe!!

##If people would accept that there must be testing phases,###
Your average persone wouldn’t know one drug from another. They aren’t often requested. Doctors prescribe them in response to marketing from big pharma who come along and say ‘try this it’s a new fangled drug, better than the old fangled drug. We’ve tested it and its safe.

###and be given the right to volunteer to test the drugs### People volunteer for trials currently before they reach the mass market after theoretically being passed as SAFE.

###without holding the pharmecutical companies liable, we’d probably have cheaper meds done faster.####
I said serious answers only please.

###Not to mention the people who can’t seem to wait will satisfy their need to be impatient### Who are all these people? show me some evidence?
David G,
Whether or not Acupunture and Homeopathy are effective depends on the studies you read.
Some studies support the effectiveness but these are labled as unscientific and biased by the by the medical establishment…..
…The same people that support companies releasing drugs that have been developed and tested in house. For some reason that bias is overlooked.
Anyway you look at it Homeopathy or Acupuncture are not reported to cause the same number of deaths as allopathy.

Moving on…. The question was about how to improve the system so that less people die from adverse reactions it is not asking to look at the holes in other therapies to make supporters of Allopathy feel better
I like your answer polly. Alternatives often get slated for being biased and unscientific.
I propose a government funded system which tests all health products on the market. everyone who manufactures has to pay into a central fund and the governments run these tests independently deciding the protocols not the groups that manufacture. They could also design the research model.

Its interesting how bloggers who loyally suport allopathy and regularly have a lot to say against alternative therapies have gone strangely silent on this issue.
Why would that be.
David G,
This isn’t a thinly vailed attack at allopathic medicine.
I care more about people than ideology.
I also care more that 100,000 people per annum die unnecesarily in the USA (how many would this number be in the rest of the world?) than offending the sensibilities of Allopaths or their supporters.
Allopaths have access to some excellent training and knowledge. If they can be shown ways of preventing unnecessary death (i thought thats why people went into medicine) there is no reason why this should not be implemented and shown to them. I don’t see why all solutions have to come from the allopathic camp. As healthcare professionals we should be looking at our patients best interest and offer them the best care.

Every Allopath knows much of what they do also does not have a good evidence base.

If we need independent evidence to test and verify complimentary medicine a government body which tests all medicine, allopathic or otherwise would be a good way to do it.

The studies are done – they’re either buried or the FDA are negligent.

There’s a simple solution and that’s to make it law to publish all studies – with long prison sentences for burying studies.

There’s almost no chance of the US doing this, so it would have to happen across the EU.