Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pt 41/46

Appendix 4. Prescription Drugs – Leading Killer in USA

“… a statistical study of hospital deaths in the U.S. conducted at the University of Toronto revealed that pharmaceutical drugs kill more people every year than are killed in traffic accidents. The study is said to show that more than two million American hospitalized patients suffered a serious adverse drug reaction (ADR) within the 12-month period of the study and, of these, over 100,000 died as a result. The researchers found that over 75 per cent of these ADRs were dose-dependent, which suggests they were due to the inherent toxicity of the drugs rather than to allergic reactions.

The data did not include fatal reactions caused by accidental overdoses or errors in administration of the drugs. If these had been included, it is estimated that another 100,000 deaths would be added to the total every year. The researchers concluded that ADRs are now the fourth leading cause of death in the United States after heart disease, cancer, and stroke.”

www.cancure.org/medical_errors.htm

“Getting the wrong drug or the wrong dosage kills hundreds or thousands of people each year, with many times that number getting injured … Even higher than the number of people who die from medication errors is the number of people who die from medication, period. Even when a prescription drug is dispensed properly, there’s no guarantee it won’t end up killing you. A remarkable study in the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that prescription drugs kill around 106,000 people in the US every year, which ranks prescription drugs as the fourth leading cause of death. Furthermore, each year sees 2,216,000 serious adverse drug reactions (defined as “those that required hospitalization, were permanently disabling, or resulted in death”). The authors of this 1998 study performed a meta-analysis on 39 previous studies covering 32 years. They factored out such things as medication errors, abuse of prescription drugs, and adverse reactions not considered serious. Plus, the study involved only people who had either been hospitalized due to drug reactions or who experienced reactions while in the hospital. People who died immediately (and, thus, never went to the hospital) and those whose deaths weren’t realized to be due to prescription drugs were not included, so the true figure is probably higher. Four years later, another study in the JAMA warned:

Patient exposure to new drugs with unknown toxic effects may be extensive. Nearly 20 million patients in the United States took at least 1 of the 5 drugs withdrawn from the market between September 1997 and September 1998. Three of these 5 drugs were new, having been on the market for less than 2 years. Seven drugs approved since 1993 and subsequently withdrawn from the market have been reported as possibly contributing to 1002 deaths.

Examining warnings added to drug labels through the years, the study’s authors found that of the new chemical entities approved from 1975 to 1999, 10 percent “acquired a new black box warning or were withdrawn from the market” by 2000. Using some kind of high-falutin’ statistical process, they estimate that the “probability of a new drug acquiring black box warnings or being withdrawn from the market over 25 years was 20%.” A statement released by one of the study’s co-authors, Sidney Wolfe, MD, Director of Public Citizen’s Health Studies Group, warned:

‘In 1997, 39 new drugs were approved by the FDA. As of now [May 2002], five of them (Rezulin, Posicor, Duract, Raxar and Baycol) have been taken off the market and an additional two (Trovan, an antibiotic and Orgaran, an anticoagulant) have had new box warnings. Thus, seven drugs approved that year (18% of the 39 drugs approved) have already been withdrawn or had a black box warning in just four years after approval. Based on our study, 20% of drugs will be withdrawn or have a black box warning within 25 years of coming on the market. The drugs approved in 1997 have already almost “achieved” this in only four years — with 21 years to go.’ How does this happen? Before the FDA approves a new drug, it must undergo clinical trials. These trials aren’t performed by the FDA, though — they’re done by the drug companies themselves. These trials often use relatively few patients, and they usually select patients most likely to react well to the drug. On top of that, the trials are often for a short period of time (weeks), even though real-world users may be on a drug for months or years at a time. Dr. Wolfe points out that even when adverse effects show up during clinical trials, the drugs are sometimes released anyway, and they end up being taken off the market because of those same adverse effects. Post-marketing reporting of adverse effects isn’t much better. The FDA runs a program to collect reports of problems with drugs, but compliance is voluntary. The generally accepted estimate in the medical community is that a scant 10 percent of individual instances of adverse effects are reported to the FDA, which would mean that the problem is ten times worse than we currently believe. Drugs aren’t released when they’ve been proven safe; they’re released when enough FDA bureaucrats — many of whom have worked for the pharmaceutical companies or will work for them in the future — can be convinced that it’s kinda safe. Basically, the use of prescription drugs by the general public can be seen as widespread, long-term clinical trials to determine their true safety. We are all guinea pigs.”

From 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know by Russ Kick, published by The Disinformation Company Ltd. http://www.disinfo.com/

Note: Heroin – that most notorious of ‘illegal’, ‘non-prescription’ drugs, was originally developed by the pharmaceutical company BAYER for use as a legal prescription drug.

“The majority of the cancer patients in this country die because of chemotherapy, which does not cure breast, colon or lung cancer. This has been documented for over a decade and nevertheless doctors still utilize chemotherapy to fight these tumors.” Allen Levin, MD, UCSF

“Several full-time scientists at the McGill Cancer Center sent to 118 doctors, all experts on lung cancer, a questionnaire to determine the level of trust they had in the therapies they were applying; they were asked to imagine that they themselves had contracted the disease and which of the six current experimental therapies they would choose. 79 doctors answered, 64 of them said that they would not consent to undergo any treatment containing cis-platinum – one of the common chemotherapy drugs they used – while 58 out of 79 believed that all the experimental therapies above were not accepted because of the ineffectiveness and the elevated level of toxicity of chemotherapy.”

Philip Day, Cancer: why we’re still dying to know the truth, Credence 2000

“If I were to contract cancer, I would never turn to a certain standard for the therapy of this disease. Cancer patients who stay away from these centers have some chance to make it.”

Professor Gorge Mathe, Scientific Medicine Stymied, Medicines Nouvelles, Paris, 1989

“Dr. Hardin Jones, lecturer at the University of California, after having analyzed for many decades statistics on cancer survival, has come to this conclusion: ‘… when not treated, the patients do not get worse or they even get better’. The unsettling conclusions of Dr. Jones have never been refuted”.

Walter Last, “The Ecologist”, Vol. 28, no. 2, March-April 1998 ADVERSE DRUG REACTIONS: How Serious Is the Problem and How Often and Why Does It Occur?

“Although some adverse drug reactions are not very serious, others cause the death, hospitalization, or serious injury of` more than 2 million people in the United states each year, including more than 100,000 fatalities. In fact, adverse drug reactions are one of the leading causes of death in the United States.’ Most of the time, these dangerous events could and should have been avoided. Even the less drastic reactions, such as change in mood, loss of appetite, and nausea, may seriously diminish the quality of life. Despite the fact that more adverse reactions occur in patients 60 or older, the odds of suffering an adverse drug reaction really begin to increase even before age 50. Almost half (49.5%) of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reports of deaths from adverse drug reactions and 61% of hospitalizations from adverse drug reactions were in people younger than 60.2 Many physical changes that affect the way the body can handle drugs actually begin in people in their thirties, but the increased prescribing of drugs does not begin for most people until they enter their fifties. By then, the amount of prescription drug use starts increasing significantly, and therefore the odds of having an adverse drug reaction also increase. The risk of an adverse drug reaction is about 33% higher in people aged 50 to 59 than it is in people aged 40.”

Adverse Reactions to Drugs Cause Hospitalization of 1.5 Million Americans Each Year:

“An analysis of numerous studies in which the cause of hospitalization was determined found that approximately 1.5 million hospitalizations a year were caused by adverse drug reactions. This means that every day more than 9,000 patients have adverse drug reactions so serious that they need to be admitted to American hospitals. Although the rate of drug-induced hospitalization is higher in older adults (an average of about 10% of all hospitalizations for older adults are caused by adverse drug reactions) because they use more drugs, a significant proportion of hospitalizations for children is also caused by adverse drug reactions. In a review of more than 6,500 admissions of children to five different hospitals, 2.0% were prompted by adverse drug reactions.”

Adverse Reactions Occur to 770,000 People a Year During Hospitalization

“In addition to the 1.5 million people a year who are admitted to the hospital because of adverse drug reactions, an additional three quarters of a million people a year develop an adverse reaction after they are hospitalized. According to national projection, based on a study involving adverse drug reactions developing in almost 800,000 patients a year, more than 2,000 patients a day, suffer an adverse event caused by drugs once they are admitted. Many of the reactions in the patients studied were serious, even life-threatening, and included cardiac arrhythmias, kidney failure, bleeding, and dangerously low blood pressure. People with these adverse reactions had an almost twofold higher risk of death compared to otherwise comparable hospitalized patients who did not have a drug reaction. Most importantly, according to the researchers, almost 50% of these adverse reactions were preventable. Among the kinds of preventable problems were adverse interactions between drugs that should not have been prescribed together (hundreds of these are listed in Chapter 3 of this book), known allergies to drugs that had not been asked about before the patients got a prescription, and excessively high doses of drugs prescribed without considering the patient’s weight and kidney functions.

Thus, adding the number of people with adverse drug reactions so serious that they require hospitalization to those in which the adverse reaction was “caused” by the hospitalization, more than 2.2 million people a year, or 6,000 patients a day, suffer these adverse reactions. In both situations, many of these drug-induced problems should have been prevented.”

Dr. Tim O’Shea, www.cancer-healing.com/pharma_pills.php

“…at least 250,000 people have attempted suicide worldwide because of Prozac alone and that at least 25,000 have succeeded.”

Professor David Healy