The New School Nurse Is Nurse Ratched

He can't. He's quoting [naturalnews.com] a website verbatim.

However, the title of the JAMA [jamanetwork.com] article is "Is US Health Really the Best in the World?", and it's available here [jhsph.edu], though apart from the statement (accompanied by another citation that I'm not ambitious enough to track down) of the number of deaths, it says little else relevant to this story.

However, I used to work with those adverse effect records, and citing them directly is incredibly misleading. The 106,000 deaths is only a tiny percentage (0.06%) of the 170,000,000 Americans on prescription medications (rough mental estimate of 48% [cdc.gov]), and it's inflated. The way adverse effects are recorded, any drug that could possibly be the cause of death is recorded as having definitely caused it. If an epilepsy drug causes a side effect, and the patient takes acetaminophen for it but overdoses and dies, the epilepsy drug is considered to be at fault, because the death was a result of its adverse effect.

The reason for this odd system of inflated numbers is that its purpose. The system was designed to inform doctors and researchers of what could happen as a result of a drug's use, including any previously-unknown interactions. By recording that an epilepsy drug, when taken with acetaminophen, could cause overdose symptoms, researchers could be pointed to an interaction between the two medications.

For direct deaths, the percentage (original research, no source) is closer to 0.001%, and the majority of these (to the point where I couldn't really differentiate "all") were where the prescription triggered an allergic reaction that wasn't already known (or at least recorded in the doctors' notes).

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/iD7m3ime4VU/the-new-school-nurse-is-nurse-ratched

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