Re: ...

I'd rather be flushed and agitated from a herb rather  than suddenly go blind from a stroke or have a massive heart attack because of a pharmaceutical drug.

Number of people that died (1994) from pharmaceutical drug useage:  106, 000

Number of people that died last year from herbal supplements:  0

Here are some more stats:

 

• In 1994, an estimated 2,216,000 (1,721,000 to 2,711,000) hospitalized patients had serious adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and 106,000 (76,000 to 137,000) had fatal ADRs, making these reactions between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death.

• Fatal ADRs accounted for 0.32 percent (95 percent confidence interval (CI), 0.23 percent to 0.41 percent) of hospitalized patients.

JAMA April 15, 1998;279(15):1200-5

BMC Nephrol. December 22, 2003

• Medication-related problems (MRP) continue to occur at a high rate in ambulatory hemodialysis (HD) patients.

• Medication-dosing problems (33.5 percent), adverse drug reactions (20.7 percent), and an indication that was not currently being treated (13.5 percent) were the most common MRP.

• 5,373 medication orders were reviewed and a MRP was identified every 15.2 medication exposures.

Nurs Times. December 9-15, 2003;99(49):24-5.

• In 2002, 16,176 adverse drug reaction reports were received, of which 67 percent related to reactions categorized as 'serious.'

Pharm World Sci. December, 2003;25(6):264-8.

• Medication administration errors (MAEs) were observed in two departments of a hospital for 20 days.

• The medication administration error rate was 14.9 percent. Dose errors were the most frequent (41 percent) errors, followed by wrong time (26 percent) and wrong rate errors. Ten percent of errors were estimated as potentially life-threatening, 26 percent potentially significant and 64 percent potentially minor.

Serious and Fatal Drug Reactions in US Hospitals

• Drug-related morbidity and mortality have been estimated to cost more that $136 billion a year in United States. These estimates are higher than the total cost of cardiovascular care or diabetes care in the United States. A major component of these costs is adverse drug reactions (ADE).

Healthsentinel.com

• The numbers of deaths reported in data sets varied 34-fold and were up to several 100-fold less than values based on extrapolations of surveillance programs.

Am J Med August 1, 2000;109(2):122-30

• About 0.05 percent of all hospital admissions were certainly or probably drug-related.

• Incidence figures based on death certificates only may seriously underestimate the true incidence of fatal adverse drug reactions.

Eur J Clin Pharmacol October, 2002;58(7):479-82

• In one study of 200 patients, ADRs may have contributed to the deaths of two (one percent) patients.

J Clin Pharm Ther October, 2000;25(5):355-61

• In a survey of over 28,000 patients, ADRs were considered to be the cause of 3.4 percent of hospital admissions. Of these, 187 ADRs were coded as severe. Gastrointestinal complaints (19 percent) represented the most common events, followed by metabolic and hemorrhagic complications (nine percent). The drugs most frequently responsible for these ADRs were diuretics, calcium channel blockers, nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs and digoxin.

J Am Geriatr Soc December, 2002;50(12):1962-8

 

http://www.mercola.com/2003/jan/15/doctors_drugs.htm

 

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