05/03/2024
It's long past time that I reactivate this page. Too much important information has emerged. A site new to me is GreenMedInfo. Their recent article on the average 2500 deaths each and every day caught my attention. Any chance something will be done, or shall we use Plan B when we can? The Deadly Cost of Prescription Drugs: How Natural Alternatives Could Save Lives
Posted on:
Friday, April 19th 2024 at 3:00 am
Written By:
GreenMedInfo Research Group
This article is copyrighted by GreenMedInfo LLC, 2024
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In a medical system that claims to "first, do no harm," a silent epidemic of pharmaceutical deaths is claiming hundreds of thousands of American lives each year. Meanwhile, the very substances demonized as dangerous - vitamins and minerals - have a pristine safety record. It's time to re-examine our deadly dependence on drugs and embrace the healing power of nature.
Prescription Drugs: The Leading Killer Hiding in Plain Sight
In a provocative analysis, Dr. Peter Gøtzsche, co-founder of the prestigious Cochrane Collaboration, has identified a shocking hidden epidemic: prescription drugs, he calculates, are now the leading cause of death in the United States, surpassing both heart disease and cancer.1
Gøtzsche's findings, published on the Brownstone Institute website, are based on a rigorous review of FDA adverse event data, placebo-controlled clinical trials, and large epidemiological studies. He estimates that the various classes of pharmaceutical drugs - from psychiatric medications to painkillers - are responsible for a staggering 882,000 U.S. deaths annually.2
Among the most lethal culprits Gøtzsche identifies are psychiatric drugs, which he implicates in hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year. Drawing on data from clinical trials and observational studies, he estimates an annual mortality rate of 2% for antipsychotics in the elderly, 2% for benzodiazepines and "Z-drugs" used for insomnia, and 2% for SSRI antidepressants in older adults.3,4,5,6,7
Extrapolating these mortality rates to the number of Americans over 65 taking psychiatric drugs, Gøtzsche calculates that these medications alone cause 390,000 deaths in this age group annually. When combined with estimated deaths from adverse drug events in hospitals (315,000), prescription opioid overdoses (70,000), and NSAID-related gastrointestinal bleeding and heart attacks (107,000), the pharmaceutical death toll reaches a mind-boggling 882,000 lives per year.2
These numbers, as shocking as they are, may even underestimate the true extent of the problem. Gøtzsche points out that most drug-related fatalities occur outside hospital settings and are rarely attributed to the medications on death certificates.2 Moreover, the FDA's voluntary adverse event reporting system is known to capture only a small fraction of serious reactions.15
Perhaps most disturbingly, Gøtzsche contends that many, if not most, of these pharmaceutical deaths are preventable, as the drugs are often unnecessary or marginally effective. He points to evidence that widely prescribed psychiatric drugs and painkillers often show minimal therapeutic benefit over placebo in clinical trials.2
