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Prescription Drugs Are the Third Leading Cause of Death?
Related: atherosclerosis, follow the money, follow the self-interest, health
re: follow the money
re: Unaccountable by Marty Makary
Wow
Prescription Drugs Are the Third Leading Cause of Death
2024-05-04, by Peter C. Gøtzsche. Emphasis added.
Overtreatment with drugs kills many people, and the death rate is increasing. It is therefore strange that we have allowed this long-lasting drug pandemic to continue, and even more so because most of the drug deaths are easily preventable.
In 2013, I estimated that our prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer,1 and in 2015, that psychiatric drugs alone are also the third leading cause of death.2 However, in the United States, it is commonly stated that our drugs are “only” the fourth leading cause of death.3,4 This estimate was derived from a 1998 meta-analysis of 39 U.S. studies where monitors recorded all adverse drug reactions that occurred while the patients were in hospital, or which were the reason for hospital admission.
This methodology clearly underestimates drug deaths. Most people who are killed by their drugs die outside hospitals, and the time people spent in hospitals was only 11 days on average in the meta-analysis.5 Moreover, the meta-analysis only included patients who died from drugs that were properly prescribed, not those who died as a result of errors in drug administration, noncompliance, overdose, or drug abuse, and not deaths where the adverse drug reaction was only possible.5
... Many people die from the drugs they take without raising any suspicion that it could be an adverse drug effect...
... psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer...
...
If we add the estimates above, 315,000 hospital deaths, 390,000 psychiatric drug deaths, 70,000 synthetic opioid deaths, and 107,000 NSAID deaths, we get 882,000 drug deaths in the United States annually.
It is difficult to know what the exact death toll of our drugs is, but there can be no doubt that they are the leading cause of death. And the death toll would be much higher if we included people below 65 years of age. Moreover, from the official number of deaths from heart disease, we would need to subtract those caused by NSAIDs, and from accidents, deaths by falls caused by psychiatric drugs and many other drugs.
If such a hugely lethal pandemic had been caused by a microorganism, we would have done everything we could to get it under control. The tragedy is that we could easily get our drug pandemic under control, but when our politicians act, they usually make matters worse. They have been so heavily lobbied by the drug industry that drug regulation has become much more permissive than it was in the past.40
...Most tragically, leading psychiatrists all over the world do not realise how ineffective and dangerous their drugs are...
WIND: hardly anyone believes this, it’s just too incredible. When I mention it to anyone, they look at my like I’m crazy. But I have yet to find a credible debunk.
And we worried about COVID and its absurdly non-credible death numbers?!
