By admin on
September 7th, 2008
- One out of every four orthopedic surgeons has cut or will operate on the wrong limb at some point in his or her career.
- Medical mistakes kill between 44,000 to 98,000 hospitalized Americans each year. Thousands more are injured causing permanent disabilities, many not even knowing their doctors are at fault.
- Presently, our laws do not require doctors to inform the patient of the true cause of his or her condition. Only when the patient specifically asks is a doctor legally bound to offer any information about the cause of his condition.
- Medical malpractice and/or negligence is the eighth most common cause of death in America! These preventable deaths exceed the deaths attributed to car accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS!
- HIV isn’t nearly as easy to spread through heterosexual sex as many people think. According to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, men almost never get HIV from women. A healthy man who has unprotected sex with a non drug-using woman has a one in 5 million chance of getting HIV. If he wears a condom, the odds drop to one in 50 million. And though it’s easier for men to infect women, the odds that an HIV-positive man will transmit the virus to a woman through sex are less than one in 1,000.
- Surveys find that the average sex session lasts from three to ten minutes. Not that any of this should be so surprising—the average hotel porn viewer watches for just 12 minutes.
- The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 33% of diseases today are caused by medical treatment i.e. iatrogenic or doctor induced illness. Doctors are the third leading cause of death in the US after heart disease and cancer causing an estimated 250,000 deaths each year according to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association July 2000.
- During the past decade and with greater frequency, there has been an alarming increase in murder/suicides, suicides, domestic violence, bizarre mass killings, mother (parents) killing children, road and air rage, school shootings and workplace violence in North America where documented evidence has shown the involvement of Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Luvox, SSRI/Antidepressant drugs and/or other mind/and mood altering drugs.
- In 2007, the St. Petersburg Times reported that drug reps often give gifts to convince doctors to prescribe the medications that they represent. Dr. James P. Orlowski tries to teach his students that interaction with drug reps is not in the best interests of patients. Even though many doctors may believe solicitation from drug reps is unethical or at the very least impractical, gifts like free meals, pens, posters, books, and free samples are offered to physicians in an effort to influence their prescription practices.
- Many Americans are aware that brand name prescriptions cost more than generic meds, and that part of the reason for the higher prices is because they’ve been hiked up by the pharmaceutical companies themselves and aren’t necessarily a direct result of expensive new ingredients. This study, however, reveals that some meds can have a mark-up of 1,000%. For example, according to the study, consumers pay approximately $215 for 100 tablets of the allergy medicine Claritin, while the cost of the generic active ingredient in Claritin only costs 71 cents.
- A former drug rep for the pharmaceutical company Eli Lily, Shahram Ahari testified before Congress, saying that “pharmaceutical companies hire former cheerleaders and ex-models to wine and dine doctors, exaggerate the drug’s benefits and underplay their side-effects.” He also explained that he was taught “how to exceed spending limits for important clients…[by] using friendships and personal gifts” and to “exploit sexual tension.”
- When Merck & Co. found out that one of their products, Vioxx, can increase the risk of heart attacks in its patients, it allegedly “played down” the evidence. Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Dr. Eric Topol accused Merck of “scientific misconduct,” and two days later, Dr. Topol was kicked off the board of governors at the Cleveland Clinic.
- A top story in the spring of 2007 centered around Zheng Xiaoyu, a Chinese drug czar who was sentenced to death “after admitting that he took bribes while running the country’s Food & Drug Administration between 1998 and 2005,” when he served as commissioner. According to The New York Times, “every year, thousands of people [in China] are sickened or killed because of rampant counterfeiting and tainted food and drugs.”
- Pharmaceutical companies are also being tried in federal courts as an answer to their exploitation of Medicare. AstraZeneca Inc. had to pay $280 million in civil penalties and $63 million in criminal penalties to the federal government after the company “paid kickbacks to doctors and coached them to cheat Medicare to promote a prostate cancer drug.”
- Wired.com reports that India is becoming a more attractive place for drug companies to run clinical trials and test out new drugs. The article explains, “more and more drug companies are conducting clinical trials in developing countries where government oversight is more lax and research can be done for a fraction of the cost.” Controversy is starting to build over the trend, however, as one expert explains. Sean Philpott, managing editor of The American Journal of Bioethics, reveals to Wired.com that such practices may be unfair, as “individuals who participate in Indian clinical trials usually won’t be educated. Offering $100 [as payment for their participation] may be undue enticement; they may not even realize that they are being coerced.”
Categories: Health Fact
Tags: Fact, malpractice, pharmaceutical
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