Prescription drugs: a major health risk

Prescription drugs, even when properly prescribed, rank fourth along with stroke as a leading cause of death. About 128,000 people die every year from drugs prescribed for them. The drugs cause about 1.9 million hospitalizations a year, and about 81 million adverse reactions. The FDA itself states that “adverse drug reactions are one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in health care.”

Just because a drug has been approved by the FDA doesn’t mean it’s safe. The risk of serious adverse reactions that occur after approval is one in three. The most infamous example was Vioxx, an FDA-approved drug which experts say caused about 120,000 traumatic cardiovascular events and 40,000 deaths. The drug is no longer on the market.

May favorite drugs to hate are statins. While deaths from these drugs are uncommon, in the US statins have been linked to 3039 cases of rhabdomyolysis over twelve years. (With rhabdomyolysis, muscle fibers break down and release their contents into the bloodstream, some of which are harmful to the kidneys and may lead to kidney failure.) Two hundred and forty of these cases resulted in death. I guess that’s a small number considering the millions of people who take the drugs, but 250 deaths is not nothing. What’s more, because a common side effect of statins is muscle pain and weakness, the drugs are a frequent cause of falls in elderly people, which often lead to the slippery slope of death following hip fractures.

The reasons for the high mortality rate are the high prescription rates. In 2016, over four billion prescriptions were filled in the US. That’s about 12 prescriptions for every person in the country. Sixty-four percent of all patient visits to physicians result in prescriptions (this was in 2000; it’s probably much more now). Adverse drug reactions increase exponentially after a patient is on four or more medications.

I am so mistrustful of drugs that I take none. Seems safer that way.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.