August, 2005

Statistics prove prescription drugs are 16,400% more deadly than terrorists.

America was rudely awakened to a new kind of danger on September 11, 2001: Terrorism.
The attacks that day left 2,996 people dead, including the passengers on the four commercial airliners that were used as weapons. Many feel it was the most tragic day in U.S. history.

Four commercial jets crashed that day. But what if six jumbo jets crashed every day in the United States, claiming the lives of 783,936 people every year? That would certainly qualify as a massive tragedy, wouldn't it?

Well, forget "what if."
The tragedy is happening right now.
Over 750,000 people actually do die in the United States every year, although not from plane crashes. They die from something far more common and rarely perceived by the public as dangerous: modern medicine.

According to the groundbreaking 2003 medical report Death by Medicine, by Drs. Gary Null, Carolyn Dean, Martin Feldman, Debora Rasio and Dorothy Smith, 783,936 people in the United States die every year from conventional medicine mistakes. That's the equivalent of six jumbo jet crashes a day for an entire year. But where is the media attention for this tragedy? Where is the government support for stopping these medical mistakes before they happen?

Since Americans spend so much money on health care, they should be getting a high quality of care, right? Unfortunately, that's not the case. Of the 783,936 annual deaths due to conventional medical mistakes, about 106,000 are from prescription drugs , according to Death by Medicine. That also is a conservative number. Some experts estimate it should be more like 200,000 because of underreported cases of adverse drug reactions.

Americans today are used to fixing problems the quick way – even when it comes to their health. Thus, they rely heavily on prescription drugs to fix their diseases. For every conceivable ailment – real or not – chances are there's a pricey prescription drug to "treat" it. Chances are even better that their drug of choice comes chock full of side effects.

The problem is, prescription drugs don't treat diseases; they merely cover the symptoms. U.S. physicians provide allopathic health care – that is, they care for disease, not health. So, the over-prescription of drugs and medications is designed to treat disease instead of preventing it. And because there are so many drugs available, unforeseen adverse drug reactions are all too common, which leads to the highly conservative annual prescription drug death rate of 106,000. Keep in mind that these numbers came before the Vioxx scandal, and Cox-2 inhibitor drugs could ultimately end up killing tens of thousands more.

The public seems to genuinely believe that drugs advertised on TV are safe, in spite of the plethora of side effects listed by the commercial's narrator, ranging from diarrhea to death. Patients feel justified in asking their physicians to prescribe them a particular drug they've seen on TV, since it surely must be safe or it wouldn't have been advertised. Remember all those TV ads heralding the wonders of Vioxx? One might wonder how many lives could have been spared if patients didn't see the ad on TV and request a prescription from their doctors.

What ultimately arises is a question of ethics.
In layman's terms, ethics are the rules or moral guidelines that govern the conduct of people or professions. Some ethics are ingrained from childhood, but some are specifically set forth. For example, nearly all medical schools have their new doctors take a modern form of the Hippocratic Oath. While few versions are identical, none include setting aside proper medical care in favor of money-making practices.

The [USA] government spends upwards of $30 billion a year on homeland security. Such spending seems important. Since 2001, 2,996 people in the United States have died from terrorism – all as a result of the 9/11 attacks. In that same period of time, 490,000 people have died from prescription drugs, not counting the Vioxx scandal. That means that prescription drugs in this country are at least 16,400 percent deadlier than terrorism. Again, those are the conservative numbers.

A more realistic number, which would include deaths from over-the-counter drugs , makes drug consumption 32,000 percent deadlier than terrorism. But the scope of "Death by Medicine" is even wider. Conventional medicine, including unnecessary surgeries, bedsores and medical errors, is 104,700 percent deadlier than terrorism. Yet, our government's attention and money is not put into reforming health care.

Couldn't a little chunk of the homeland security money be better spent on overhauling the corrupt U.S. healthcare system, the leading cause of death in America? Couldn't we forfeit the color-coded threat system in favor of stricter guidelines on medical research and prescription drugs? No one is attempting to say that terrorism in the world is not a problem, especially for a high-profile country like the United States. No one is saying that the people who died on 9/11 didn't matter or weren't horribly wronged by the terrorists that day. But there are more dangerous things in the United States being falsely represented as safe and healthy, when, in reality, they are deadly. The corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and in America's healthcare system poses a far greater threat to the health, safety and welfare of Americans today than terrorism.