Medically-Caused Deaths In America

[Serpo]

Medically-Caused Deaths In America
By Jon Rappoport
An Exclusive Interview With Barbara Starfield
6-29-10


The American health system, like clockwork, causes a mind-boggling number of deaths every year.

The figures have been known for a decade. The story was covered briefly when a landmark study surfaced, and then it sank like a stone.

The truth was inconvenient for many interests. That has not changed. "Medical coverage for all" is a banner that conceals ugly facts.

On July 26, 2000, the US medical community received a titanic shock to the system, when one of its most respected public-health experts, Dr. Barbara Starfield, revealed her findings on healthcare in America. Starfield was, and still is, associated with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

The Starfield study, "Is US health really the best in the world?", published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, came to the following conclusions:

Every year in the US there are:

12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgeries;

7,000 deaths from medication errors in hospitals;

20,000 deaths from other errors in hospitals;

80,000 deaths from infections acquired in hospitals;

106,000 deaths from FDA-approved correctly prescribed medicines.

The total of medically-caused deaths in the US every year is 225,000.

This makes the medical system the third leading cause of death in the US, behind heart disease and cancer.

The Starfield study is the most disturbing revelation about modern healthcare in America ever published. The credentials of its author and the journal in which it appeared are, within the highest medical circles, impeccable.

On the heels of Starfield's astonishing findings, media reporting was extensive, but it soon dwindled. No major newspaper or television network mounted an ongoing "Medicalgate" investigation. Neither the US Department of Justice nor federal health agencies undertook prolonged remedial action.

All in all, those parties who could have taken effective steps to correct this situation preferred to ignore it.

I interviewed Dr. Starfield by email. This is an edited version of the interview.

In the medical research community, have your medically-caused mortality statistics been debated, or have these figures been accepted, albeit with some degree of shame?

The findings have been accepted by those who study them. There has been only one detractor, a former medical school dean, who has received a lot of attention for claiming that the US health system is the best there is and we need more of it. He has a vested interest in medical schools and teaching hospitals (they are his constituency).

Have health agencies of the federal government consulted with you on ways to mitigate the effects of the US medical system?

NO.

Are you aware of any systematic efforts, since your 2000 JAMA study was published, to remedy the main categories of medically caused deaths in the US?

No systematic efforts; however, there have been a lot of studies. Most of them indicate higher rates [of death] than I calculated.

Can you offer an opinion about how the FDA can be so mortally wrong about so many drugs?

Yes, it cannot divest itself from vested interests. [There is] a large literature about this, mostly unrecognized by the people because the industry-supported media give it no attention.

Did your 2000 JAMA study sail through peer review, or was there some opposition to publishing it?

It was rejected by the first journal that I sent it to, on the grounds that 'it would not be interesting to readers'!

Would it be correct to say that, when your JAMA study was published in 2000, it caused a momentary stir and was thereafter ignored by the medical community and by pharmaceutical companies?

Are you sure it was a momentary stir? I still get at least one email a day asking for a reprint---ten years later! The problem is that its message is obscured by those that do not want any change in the US health care system.

Since the FDA approves every medical drug given to the American people, and certifies it as safe and effective, how can that agency remain calm about the fact that these medicines are causing 106,000 deaths per year?

Even though there will always be adverse events that cannot be anticipated, the fact is that more and more unsafe drugs are being approved for use. Many people attribute that to the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is (for the past ten years or so) required to pay the FDA for reviews---which puts the FDA into an untenable position of working for the industry it is regulating. There is a large literature on this.

Aren't your 2000 findings a severe indictment of the FDA and its standard practices?

They are an indictment of the US health care industry: insurance companies, specialty and disease-oriented medical academia, the pharmaceutical and device manufacturing industries, all of which contribute heavily to re-election campaigns of members of Congress. The problem is that we do not have a government that is free of influence of vested interests. Alas, [it] is a general problem of our society-which clearly unbalances democracy.

What was your personal reaction when you reached the conclusion that the US medical system was the third leading cause of death in the US?

I had previously done studies on international comparisons and knew that there were serious deficits in the US health care system, most notably in lack of universal coverage and a very poor primary care infrastructure. So I wasn't surprised.

Do the 106,000 deaths from medical drugs only involve drugs prescribed to patients in hospitals, or does this statistic also cover people prescribed drugs who are not in-patients in hospitals?

I tried to include everything in my estimates. Since the commentary was written, many more dangerous drugs have been added to the marketplace.

INTERVIEWER COMMENTS:

This interview with Dr. Starfield reveals that, even when an author has unassailable credentials within the medical-research establishment, the findings can result in no changes made to the system.

Yes, many persons and organizations within the medical system contribute to the annual death totals of patients, and media silence and public ignorance are certainly major factors, but the FDA is the assigned gatekeeper, when it comes to the safety of medical drugs. The buck stops there. If those drugs the FDA is certifying as safe are killing, like clockwork, 106,000 people a year, the Agency must be held accountable. The American people must understand that.

As for the other 119,000 people killed every year as a result of hospital treatment, this horror has to be laid at the doors of those institutions. Further, to the degree that hospitals are regulated and financed by state and federal governments, the relevant health agencies assume culpability.

It is astounding, as well, that the US Department of Justice has failed to weigh in on Starfield's findings. If 225,000 medically caused deaths per year is not a crime by the Dept. of Justice's standards, then what is?

To my knowledge, not one person in America has been fired from a job or even censured as result of these medically caused deaths.

The pharmaceutical giants stand back and carve up the populace into "promising markets." They seek new disease labels and new profits from more and more toxic drugs. They do whatever they can-legally or illegally-to influence doctors in their prescribing habits. Some drug studies which cast new medicines in a negative light are buried. FDA panels are filled with doctors who have drug-company ties. Legislators are incessantly lobbied and supported with pharma campaign monies.

<http://www.newswithviewsstore.com/mm5/merchant.mvc>

Nutrition, the cornerstone of good health, is ignored or devalued by most physicians. The FDA continues to attack nutritional supplements, even though the overall safety record of these nutrients is good, whereas, once again, the medical drugs the FDA certifies as safe are killing 106,000 Americans per year.

Physicians are trained to pay exclusive homage to peer-reviewed published drug studies. These doctors unfailingly ignore the fact that, if medical drugs are killing a million Americans per decade, the studies on which those drugs are based must be fraudulent or, at the very least, massively incompetent. In other words, the whole literature is suspect, unreliable, and impenetrable.

© 2010 Jon Rappoport - All Rights Reserved

"Never in the history of the world has there been a situation so bad that the government couldn't make it worse."
http://www.rense.com/general91/medic.htm

[Serpo]

Lives destroyed by happy pills: As our use of antidepressants DOUBLES in a decade, experts say thousands are being given dangerous drugs they don't need

By Jerome Burne
Last updated at 8:00 AM on 29th June 2010

Clare Morgan was going through a rocky patch: her long-standing relationship had hit difficulties and she was struggling financially. But the self-described 'optimist' felt she was managing to cope.

Then the 35-year-old biologist started experiencing unusual symptoms. 'Out of the blue, I felt really agitated - I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't sleep, and I felt very shaky,' she recalls. 'I'd been under some stress. But my symptoms seemed too odd for that to be the whole explanation.'

After about six weeks she went to see her doctor, who diagnosed depression and anxiety. 'I asked him if he was sure, because there were other symptoms such as diarrhoea, weight-loss and vomiting. But he confirmed his diagnosis and prescribed an antidepressant.'
Increasing numbers of Britons are taking antidepressant drugs, with prescriptions doubling over the past ten years, according to a report this month

Increasing numbers of Britons are taking antidepressant drugs, with prescriptions doubling over the past ten years, according to a report this month

Unfortunately this only made her feel worse; she developed the shakes as well as suicidal thoughts. In an attempt to remedy this, her GP changed the medication three weeks later. But nothing changed.

And after mentioning her suicidal thoughts to her doctor, she was put under the supervision of a mental health team.

Six weeks later, Clare was put on yet another antidepressant, along with a tranquilliser and an anti-psychotic drug. She was now sleeping 14 hours a day; unable to work, she had to rely on her boyfriend for support.

'I was zombified, but still felt the anxiety and the terror, and that didn't seem right. However, my doctor simply increased my dose.'

After six miserable months, Clare's doctor admitted the drug treatment wasn't working and suggested electric shock treatment. 'I said "no way" and decided to come off the antidepressants,' she says. This proved 'fantastically hard - worse, actually, than being on them'.

'The only good part was a brilliant nurse, who took me seriously when I said I'd always felt that something physical had caused my symptoms and put me in touch with a sympathetic private doctor,' she says.

A year-and-a-half after her symptoms began, Clare was diagnosed with an overactive thyroid and a problem with her adrenal glands. 'That was why I had been so bizarrely agitated, had diarrhoea and had lost weight.'
Depression Check.jpg

Clare's story is extreme, but it is far from unique. Increasing numbers of Britons are taking antidepressant drugs, with prescriptions doubling over the past ten years, according to a report this month. In 2000, there were 20 million prescriptions - this rose to 39 million last year.

While this rise is partly being blamed on the recession, experts are concerned that misdiagnosis is a major factor. Indeed, a study published recently in The Lancet found that the average GP will wrongly diagnose 16 out of every 100 patients they see with depression and anxiety.

As Dr Alex Mitchell, consultant psychiatrist at Leicester General Hospital, explains: 'A busy GP sees about 100 patients a week. Out of those, 20 will be suffering from depression, but he will spot only ten of them and treat five, usually with drugs.'

Not only are the depressed missing out on treatment, 16 of those 100 patients will be told they are suffering from depression when they aren't.

One of the reasons this happens is because the official test GPs use to check if you're depressed involves two very basic questions: During the past month, have you been bothered by feeling down, depressed or hopeless?

During the past month, have you been bothered by having little interest or pleasure in doing things?

'Ideally, GPs shouldn't just rely on these two questions, although they are a NICE-approved way of diagnosing depression,' says Dr Mitchell.

'It's not really GPs' fault,' he adds. 'They haven't got enough time to give longer questionnaires. We did find that serious cases were less likely to be missed than milder ones.'

But Dr Mitchell's research shows that at least two patients a week will walk out from an average surgery with a prescription for a totally unnecessary and possibly damaging antidepressant. That adds up to hundreds of thousands of patients in the UK every year.

most commonly used drugs for depression are SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors - they come with a range of nasty potential side-effects.

Those for Seroxat, for instance, include loss of appetite, severe mental/ mood changes, uncontrolled movements, irregular heartbeat and a raised risk of cataracts.

As well as side-effects from a drug you possibly shouldn't even be taking, coming off such drugs can be extremely difficult, as Clare Morgan found.
'The problem is that antidepressants have side-effects and can increase the risk of suicide when given to children or young adults,' says Professor Kirsch

'The problem is that antidepressants have side-effects and can increase the risk of suicide when given to children or young adults,' says Professor Kirsch

'The doctors said there were no withdrawal problems, but when I tried to stop taking them, the panic and horror became so great I wanted to kill myself. I even searched for details on the internet about hanging myself. I didn't want to live like that.'

Then she came across a charity which specialised in withdrawal from prescription medication. The Liverpool-based Council for Information on Tranquillisers and Antidepressants is one of the few such centres in the UK.

'We are seeing an increasing amount of people who have a serious problem coming off SSRI antidepressants,' says Pam Armstrong, a nurse consultant and co-founder of the charity. 'Doctors are happy to put people on them, but they haven't a clue about getting them off.'

For the majority of people, misdiagnosis and withdrawal problems are not, however, an issue. For them, the real question is whether the drugs are actually effective. Many say antidepressants have really helped them.

But now, one dogged researcher has found the drugs are no better than a placebo - and that the drugs industry has tried to hide this.

Professor Irving Kirsch, a psychologist at Hull University, used the Freedom of Information Act in the U.S. to get access to all the data the pharmaceutical companies had submitted when their drugs were licensed.

As well as finding that the negative results were not published, when Professor Kirsch combined the results from the published and unpublished trials, all brands of SSRIs showed up as little better than a placebo.

Even worse, Kirsch says that both the drugs companies and the U.S. regulators knew this, but chose to keep it from doctors and their patients.

He quotes an internal Federal Drug Administration memo saying it was 'of no practical value to patient or physician' to reveal that SSRIs are no better than placebos.

But if people do get better on antidepressants, what's the problem? 'The problem is that antidepressants have side-effects and can increase the risk of suicide when given to children or young adults,' replies Professor Kirsch.

Since 2004, NICE has recommended that patients with mild to moderate depression or anxiety should be offered a talking therapy

'There are safer and more effective alternatives,' he says, referring to talking therapies.

In fact, officially these are precisely the sort of treatment Clare Morgan and many others should be getting, instead of 'harmful' drugs. Since 2004, NICE has recommended that patients with mild to moderate depression or anxiety should be offered a talking therapy.

The one with the best evidence is called cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), which concentrates on changing the thoughts that go with negative feelings.

The benefits are clear: those getting this treatment are less likely to relapse than those on antidepressant medication. In one study, the relapse rate was 5 per cent on therapy, 40 per cent on the drugs.

Even patients who feel they have benefited from antidepressants often appreciate help from a therapist as well, as Louise Luxton, a 36-year-old make-up artist living in London, discovered.

She'd suffered from anxiety and was put on Prozac, ÂÂ*but 'felt terrible'.

She says:ÂÂ* 'Seroxat worked better for a while. ÂÂ*But years later when things got really bad, ÂÂ*Seroxat didn't help at all.'

What did help was medication in combination with a talking therapy.

'The therapist taught me techniques to use when the anxiety gets too bad and he found the right drug for me. I wish I'd been able to see him a lot earlier.'

She's now happily married and planning to have a baby.

But talking therapy is infamously hard to find. Nearly three-quarters of GPs say they hand out pills becasue therapy just isn't available, a recent study by the Mental Health Foundation found.

Indeed, Louise had to pay for treatment privately. 'If you don't have that sort of money, your prospects can be pretty grim,' she says.

Three years ago, the Government announced it was spending £173million on training an army of 3,600 extra therapists which could be rolled out across the country by 2011 to provide CBT to all those suffering from depression and anxiety.

Professor David Clark, who heads up the scheme, is optimistic about reaching this target: 'By 2011, we are due to have all the therapists in place and we will have provided treatments to an extra 900,000 patients over the three years,' he says.

So far, 115 out of 154 primary care trusts in England have agreed to set up a centre.

But as Good Health has discovered, the roll-out of the scheme nationally may be having the effect of actually reducing the number of therapists in some areas.

Mariam Kemple, of the mental health charity Mind, explains. 'We've been getting reports that when the money to set up one of the new centres comes through, the primary care trust cancels contracts with existing therapists, saying the centre will be providing treatment for depression and anxiety in future.'

Similar reports have come in from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.

'The whole point of the project to roll out new therapy centres was to make up for the serious shortage of talking treatments,' says Paul Farmer, chief executive of Mind. 'We would be extremely worried if some trusts are axing existing services and using the new one as a replacement.'

Professor Clark blames the way funding is going into the local trusts' general pot - 'some may have been deciding to save money on existing provision'.

Although the Government has just pledged to spend £70 million over the next year providing more therapists and centres, this is not going to be ring-fenced.

This provision matters, as Clare Morgan knows only too well.

'If I'd been able to see a therapist initially, everything might have been different. Someone might have spotted that my symptoms weren't necessarily depression,' she says.

Now taking steroids for her condition, she is training to become a science teacher.

'Lots of people say they benefit from antidepressants, but doctors need to be more responsive when patients say they are having a bad time with them. Increasing the dose is often not the answer.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1290402/Lives-destroyed-happy-pills-As-use-antidepressants-DOUBLES-decade-experts-say-thousands-given-dangerous-drugs-dont-need.html#ixzz0sJM8WO5A

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1290402/Lives-destroyed-happy-pills-As-use-antidepressants-DOUBLES-decade-experts-say-thousands-given-dangerous-drugs-dont-need.html