Plug Drugs
01-06-2014, 06:59 AM
Comparing Death Statistics Between Medical Malpractice and Illicit Drug Use
Every article you're going to find online seems to give different numbers and all have different qualifiers for what exactly constitutes "medical errors"; medical malpractice kills somewhere in the ballpark of 400,000 people every year globally. In the US, depending on who you ask, yearly deaths from malpractice are somewhere in the range of 98,000 to 195,000
Now, let's narrow down those deaths and take a look at just one specific type of medical malpractice death: medication mixups. According to this article, http://www.campaignzero.org/quick-co...cation-errors/, medication mixups lead to 7,000 deaths a year in the US just counting the ones in hospitals -- according to that article, tens of thousands more deaths from medication mixups happen outside of the hospital, aka a mixup in the medication obtained at a pharmacy.
Now, these numbers begin to sound a little concerning when you consider another statistic: the number of deaths resulting from illegal drug use. Again, the numbers are going to be skewed depending on who you ask and what the qualifiers are, but generally speaking we could put deaths resulting from illicit drugs somewhere in the ballpark of 4,500 in the US and 100,000 globally. According to this article, http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreation...ose/facts.html "In 2010, there were 38,329 drug overdose deaths in the United States", which includes accidental prescription overdoses.
Getting a truly accurate perception of the number of deaths each year from medical errors versus illegal drugs is difficult, since all the numbers and statistics seem to fluctuate depending on whether the source was pro or anti drug and whether the article was attacking or defending doctors and the medical/pharmaceutical industry.
Anyways, based on most statistics, we end up faced with the conclusion that medical errors and medication mixups are killing more people each year than recreational drugs (excluding tobacco and cigarettes). And certainly, the deaths from medical malpractice and med mixups should sound much more alarming to us than the number of deaths from recreational drugs, as one is self inflicted while the other is either accidental or resulting from extreme negligence.
Just what kind of medication mixups are we talking about exactly? Are these people middle-aged housewives who were on a cocktail of opioids, benzos, antihistamines, antipsychotics, alcohol, and a dozen other downers that end up killing them? Were they dear old grandma and grandad dying from their insane cocktail mix of all sorts of heavy medications that lead to seizures, strokes, heart attacks, pulmonary edema, something of that nature?
Somewhere along the line while trying to come up with the whys and wherefores, after trying to think of what possible medication mixups could kill that many people, you start to realize how large of a role doctors' incompetence has to be playing in all of this.
You might then ask yourself a very good question, "what the hell do doctors even do really?", and end up concluding that unless you just got mangled in a car accident or are otherwise in dire need of a surgeon, a doctor acts as nothing more than the middle man between you and the pharmaceutical companies.
Which finally brings you to the realization that doctors actually know very little about the medications they are prescribing, and instead they base the vast majority of their practice off of what pharmaceutical reps have told them to prescribe.
With all of this considered, it dawns on you that the real reason all of those deaths are happening is not because of anomalous pharmacological intertwinings or some theoretical concept in pharmacokinetics, but its because the pharmaceutical industry is a multi-multi-billion dollar industry - in fact it is one of thee largest industries on the planet. The shear scale of money being made and exchanged and enormity of the business being conducted completely drowns out and overpowers any voice of concern and blazes right on past any people first considering the possibilities of things like negative interactions, unforseen consequences, and irreversible damage.
...Looking Forward... (Mostly just wildly stated opinions from here until the end of the post...)
So what do you when you live in a world where quite a large chunk of all medical practice ( it's more likely the overwhelming majority if we're being honest) is hokey; broken; illusory/meaningless; lethally pointless; morbidly unecessary; thoughtless; a monstrosity; a total abomination?
With nonsensities like "restless leg syndrome" on the loose, and the common modern practice of prescribing serotonin and serotononin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors as a "cure all" for all ailments, which only ever had a theoretical legitimacy for potential as a medicine, and for which much speculation exists as to whether they permanently damage the serotonergic system, leading to long-term or permanent worsening of symptoms upon discontinuation compared to before the medication had started to be taken - and things like permanently decreasing sexual sensitivity and irreversibly altering the threshold of sexual arousal; permanently changing the neurological processes behind sexual arousal, never again to be in their normal state.....
Do we really need proton pump inhibitors for heartburn? Or antihistamines with ridiculous obscenely long half-lives and a broad pharmacological profile including a high affinity as serotonergic/noradrenergic leading to all sorts of unpleasant effects you never wanted and can't figure out the cause of, such as feelings of dread, panic, and terror! Hypomania and erratically fluctuating emotions! Feeling disconnected from reality! Unexplainable and unwarranted irritability and aggression! Lashing out at loved ones! Feeling like you're not ever truly "awake" and are stuck in a hazy dream world. Only $5.99; thrown in, like, friggin everything and often paired up with a dissociative NMDA antagonist (which also has an enormous pharmacological profile and potential for interactions), and who could forget it's most common partner, the highly hepatotoxic mystery-acting pain reliever that doesn't actually seem to do anything at all other than kill your liver...
I don't even know where to begin with all the bogus supplements out there; and vitamin supplements with vitamins that are barely soluble and pass right on through you to come out with your poop (the companies making magnesium oxide supplements should use the slogan "It's magnesium ...technically.")
Just what the hell should we do? When you sit and wonder things like "what will taking this every day do to me in 10-20 years?", your guesswork is really just as valid as the conjobs selling and marketing the stuff
Still, for a psychiatric field that just 3 generations ago was cutting off the frontal lobes of undesirables to make them easier to store, and for a human species that's spent the last 80 years lead poisoned, maybe I'm expecting too much.
Every article you're going to find online seems to give different numbers and all have different qualifiers for what exactly constitutes "medical errors"; medical malpractice kills somewhere in the ballpark of 400,000 people every year globally. In the US, depending on who you ask, yearly deaths from malpractice are somewhere in the range of 98,000 to 195,000
Now, let's narrow down those deaths and take a look at just one specific type of medical malpractice death: medication mixups. According to this article, http://www.campaignzero.org/quick-co...cation-errors/, medication mixups lead to 7,000 deaths a year in the US just counting the ones in hospitals -- according to that article, tens of thousands more deaths from medication mixups happen outside of the hospital, aka a mixup in the medication obtained at a pharmacy.
Now, these numbers begin to sound a little concerning when you consider another statistic: the number of deaths resulting from illegal drug use. Again, the numbers are going to be skewed depending on who you ask and what the qualifiers are, but generally speaking we could put deaths resulting from illicit drugs somewhere in the ballpark of 4,500 in the US and 100,000 globally. According to this article, http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreation...ose/facts.html "In 2010, there were 38,329 drug overdose deaths in the United States", which includes accidental prescription overdoses.
Getting a truly accurate perception of the number of deaths each year from medical errors versus illegal drugs is difficult, since all the numbers and statistics seem to fluctuate depending on whether the source was pro or anti drug and whether the article was attacking or defending doctors and the medical/pharmaceutical industry.
Anyways, based on most statistics, we end up faced with the conclusion that medical errors and medication mixups are killing more people each year than recreational drugs (excluding tobacco and cigarettes). And certainly, the deaths from medical malpractice and med mixups should sound much more alarming to us than the number of deaths from recreational drugs, as one is self inflicted while the other is either accidental or resulting from extreme negligence.
Just what kind of medication mixups are we talking about exactly? Are these people middle-aged housewives who were on a cocktail of opioids, benzos, antihistamines, antipsychotics, alcohol, and a dozen other downers that end up killing them? Were they dear old grandma and grandad dying from their insane cocktail mix of all sorts of heavy medications that lead to seizures, strokes, heart attacks, pulmonary edema, something of that nature?
Somewhere along the line while trying to come up with the whys and wherefores, after trying to think of what possible medication mixups could kill that many people, you start to realize how large of a role doctors' incompetence has to be playing in all of this.
You might then ask yourself a very good question, "what the hell do doctors even do really?", and end up concluding that unless you just got mangled in a car accident or are otherwise in dire need of a surgeon, a doctor acts as nothing more than the middle man between you and the pharmaceutical companies.
Which finally brings you to the realization that doctors actually know very little about the medications they are prescribing, and instead they base the vast majority of their practice off of what pharmaceutical reps have told them to prescribe.
With all of this considered, it dawns on you that the real reason all of those deaths are happening is not because of anomalous pharmacological intertwinings or some theoretical concept in pharmacokinetics, but its because the pharmaceutical industry is a multi-multi-billion dollar industry - in fact it is one of thee largest industries on the planet. The shear scale of money being made and exchanged and enormity of the business being conducted completely drowns out and overpowers any voice of concern and blazes right on past any people first considering the possibilities of things like negative interactions, unforseen consequences, and irreversible damage.
...Looking Forward... (Mostly just wildly stated opinions from here until the end of the post...)
So what do you when you live in a world where quite a large chunk of all medical practice ( it's more likely the overwhelming majority if we're being honest) is hokey; broken; illusory/meaningless; lethally pointless; morbidly unecessary; thoughtless; a monstrosity; a total abomination?
With nonsensities like "restless leg syndrome" on the loose, and the common modern practice of prescribing serotonin and serotononin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors as a "cure all" for all ailments, which only ever had a theoretical legitimacy for potential as a medicine, and for which much speculation exists as to whether they permanently damage the serotonergic system, leading to long-term or permanent worsening of symptoms upon discontinuation compared to before the medication had started to be taken - and things like permanently decreasing sexual sensitivity and irreversibly altering the threshold of sexual arousal; permanently changing the neurological processes behind sexual arousal, never again to be in their normal state.....
Do we really need proton pump inhibitors for heartburn? Or antihistamines with ridiculous obscenely long half-lives and a broad pharmacological profile including a high affinity as serotonergic/noradrenergic leading to all sorts of unpleasant effects you never wanted and can't figure out the cause of, such as feelings of dread, panic, and terror! Hypomania and erratically fluctuating emotions! Feeling disconnected from reality! Unexplainable and unwarranted irritability and aggression! Lashing out at loved ones! Feeling like you're not ever truly "awake" and are stuck in a hazy dream world. Only $5.99; thrown in, like, friggin everything and often paired up with a dissociative NMDA antagonist (which also has an enormous pharmacological profile and potential for interactions), and who could forget it's most common partner, the highly hepatotoxic mystery-acting pain reliever that doesn't actually seem to do anything at all other than kill your liver...
I don't even know where to begin with all the bogus supplements out there; and vitamin supplements with vitamins that are barely soluble and pass right on through you to come out with your poop (the companies making magnesium oxide supplements should use the slogan "It's magnesium ...technically.")
Just what the hell should we do? When you sit and wonder things like "what will taking this every day do to me in 10-20 years?", your guesswork is really just as valid as the conjobs selling and marketing the stuff
Still, for a psychiatric field that just 3 generations ago was cutting off the frontal lobes of undesirables to make them easier to store, and for a human species that's spent the last 80 years lead poisoned, maybe I'm expecting too much.