Nightmare stories of nurses giving potent drugs meant for one patient to another and surgeons removing the wrong body parts have dominated recent headlines about medical care. Lest you assume those cases are the exceptions, a new study by patient safety researchers provides some context.
Their analysis, published in the BMJ on Tuesday, shows that "medical errors" in hospitals and other health care facilities are incredibly common and may now be the third leading cause of death in the United States -- claiming 251,000 lives every year, more than respiratory disease, accidents, stroke and Alzheimer's.Idiots wearing stethoscopes might be responsible for killing a quarter of a million people a year in the US.
Fifteen years ago, a report by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, a nationally recognized medical society which accredits hospitals, stressed that pain was vastly undertreated in the United States.Of course there were pain medications available for this. Lots and lots of medications.
The report recommended that physicians routinely assess pain at every patient visit.
It also suggested that opioids could be effectively and more broadly used without fear of addiction.
The report was heavily publicized, and today it is widely acknowledged that it led to massive – and sometimes inappropriate – increases in the use of prescription opioid drugs to treat pain.Oxycontin is one of those medications and Perdue Pharma has made billions from it.
With more opioids being prescribed by well-meaning doctors, some were diverted from the legal supply chain – through theft from medicine cabinets or trade on the black market – to the street for illicit use.
As more opioids leaked out, more people started to experiment with them for recreational purposes.
This increase in supply certainly explains a large part of the current opioid abuse epidemic, but it doesn't explain all of it.
According to the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians, Americans consume 80 percent of the world’s pain pills.1 Misleading pain statistics are used to push increasingly stronger narcotics into the marketplace.When crack cocaine hit American cities in the mid 1980's it quickly became the drug of choice. Now heroin has come roaring back in a big way. This taste for opioids was no doubt fueled by prescription drugs such as Oxycontin. Our county is the poster child for fatal drug overdoses.
Since OxyContin was introduced in 1996, Canada has recorded the second-highest number of prescription opioid painkiller addictions and the world's second-highest death rate from overdoses. In the US, narcotic overdose deaths now surpass deaths from murders and fatal car accidents.
[...] Because of its insatiable demand, some patients with legal prescriptions begin selling OxyContin tablets to drug dealers for a profit. The pharmaceutical company earned billions while watching their “miracle drug” turn ordinary citizens into hardened addicts and criminals.
How many people have died as a result of OxyContin? A firm number is difficult to ascertain. A variety of numbers have appeared in media reports, usually lacking citations or references, and many deaths involve a combination of drugs and alcohol.3
What is known is that narcotic overdose deaths have quadrupled in the last decade. Deaths from overdoses of drugs like hydrocodone (Vicodin), morphine, and oxycodone/OxyContin rose from 1.4 per 100,000 in 1999 to 5.4 per 100,000 in 2011.
In 2009, 1.2 million emergency department visits involved the “nonmedical use of pharmaceuticals or dietary stimulants” (which includes abuse). Oxycodone alone or in combination with other drugs accounted for 175,949 of those visits.
SAGINAW, Michigan — Only a couple of families have taken advantage of a new service available at a Saginaw funeral home.The Chapel owners also are planning to install a car wash in the viewing area. They'll call it "The Final Rinse."
Drive-thru viewings.
Paradise Funeral Chapel recently started offering the option, which allows mourners to pay their last respects on the go. It was designed in part to cater to those with physical limitations.
The funeral home's president, Ivan Phillips, says he expects more customers to opt for the drive-thru once they learn it's not a gimmick and is safe to use.
[...]Curtains covering the window open when sensors underneath the pavement recognize the presence of a car. Mourners then get three minutes to view the body as music plays.
People who drink too much cost the U.S. economy $223.5 billion a year, and governments pay more than 60 percent of their health care costs, federal health experts reported on Monday.That would put alcohol abuse at #7 on the top ten list. And it is an entirely preventable cause of death. The treatment is simple but, oh, so very difficult for so many.
Alcohol abuse kills 79,000 people a year, the report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.
Most of the costs came from binge drinking, which the CDC defines as four or more drinks per occasion for a woman, and five or more drinks per occasion for a man.
“It is striking that over three-quarters of the cost of excessive alcohol consumption is due to binge drinking, which is reported by about 15 percent of U.S. adults,” the CDC’s Dr. Robert Brewer said in a statement.
In a report by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, President Barack Obama today was urged to speed passage of his health care reform and name a senior member of the White House staff to the position of Pandemic Czar. Legislation must be passed by mid-September to allow for the vaccination of as many as 40 gazillion people, the advisory group said.
“This isn’t the flu that we’re used to,” said Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. “The 2009 H1N1 virus will kill just about everyone this fall. We won’t know until we’re in the middle of the flu season whether any of our Baby Boomers will survive, but because it’s a new strain, it’s likely to kill oodles of oldsters.”
