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Drugs and Doctors May be the Leading Cause of Death in U.S.
Posted By Dr. Mercola | January 15 2003
By Joseph Mercola, D.O.
At one time, the main title of my Web site read:
Doctors are the Third leading Cause of Death
Many of you reading this have read or seen this in many places other than my Web site. This article, available on my home page, was widely circulated on the Internet and was one of the reasons why my Web site was initially popular. What you may not realize is that I am the one who made this analysis and popularized it. The original study was published by Dr. Starfield, a full professor of public health at the most prestigious hospital in the United States, Johns Hopkins. Her study never had the headline in it, but instead listed the published research documenting the various causes of deaths that doctors contributed to. I simply added them all up and compared them to cardiovascular diseases and cancer and came up with the above headline, which was widely circulated on the Internet.
Interestingly, when I contacted Dr. Starfield by e-mail she disagreed with the headline I had come up with. She did not feel that doctors were the third leading cause of death, but thought they were the number one cause of death because of their failure to inform their patients about the truth of health. Now this might be a bit too harsh as even if people understand health truth they have freedom of choice and can choose to use sugar, soda and drugs (legal and illegal) to compromise their health and longevity.
However, JAMA actually published a study a year earlier that could support that doctors may be the leading cause of death in the United States.
This finding is more of a speculation though, so below I have provided some other studies to support this assertion.
- In 1994, an estimated 2,216,000 (1,721,000 to 2,711,000) hospitalized patients had serious adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and 106,000 (76,000 to 137,000) had fatal ADRs, making these reactions between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death.
- Fatal ADRs accounted for 0.32 percent (95 percent confidence interval (CI), 0.23 percent to 0.41 percent) of hospitalized patients.
BMC Nephrol. December 22, 2003
- Medication-related problems (MRP) continue to occur at a high rate in ambulatory hemodialysis (HD) patients.
- Medication-dosing problems (33.5 percent), adverse drug
reactions (20.7 percent), and an indication that was not
currently being treated (13.5 percent) were the most common MRP.
- 5,373 medication orders were reviewed and a MRP was identified every 15.2 medication exposures.
- In 2002, 16,176 adverse drug reaction reports were received, of which 67 percent related to reactions categorized as 'serious.'
- Medication administration errors (MAEs) were observed in two departments of a hospital for 20 days.
- The medication administration error rate was 14.9 percent.
Dose errors were the most frequent (41 percent) errors,
followed by wrong time (26 percent) and wrong rate errors. Ten
percent of errors were estimated as potentially life-threatening,
26 percent potentially significant and 64 percent potentially
minor.
- Drug-related morbidity and mortality have been estimated to cost more that $136 billion a year in United States. These estimates are higher than the total cost of cardiovascular care or diabetes care in the United States. A major component of these costs is adverse drug reactions (ADE).
- About 0.05 percent of all hospital admissions were certainly or probably drug-related.
- Incidence figures based on death certificates only may seriously underestimate the true incidence of fatal adverse drug reactions.
- In one study of 200 patients, ADRs may have contributed to the deaths of two (one percent) patients.
- In a survey of over 28,000 patients, ADRs were considered to be the cause of 3.4 percent of hospital admissions. Of these, 187 ADRs were coded as severe. Gastrointestinal complaints (19 percent) represented the most common events, followed by metabolic and hemorrhagic complications (nine percent). The drugs most frequently responsible for these ADRs were diuretics, calcium channel blockers, nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs and digoxin.
