Medical Errors Killing 98,000 Annually!
by Clark Hansen, N.M.D.

Nov 30,1999 – As many as 98,000 Americans die unnecessarily every year of medical mistakes made by physicians, pharmacists and other health care professionals. That’s more than from breast cancer, highway accidents or AIDS combined according to the report from the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences.

"These stunningly high rates of medical errors, resulting in deaths, permanent disability and unnecessary suffering, are simply unacceptable in a medical system that promises first to ‘do no harm,’" said William C. Richardson, president of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and chairman of the expert committee that compiled the blunt, 223-page report.

The report concludes that most errors are medication mistakes. Donald M. Berwick, a Harvard professor of health care policy and president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a non-profit educational and research organization, who was on of the 19 experts who worked on the report, said, "People get the wrong drug or the wrong dose or they get it at the wrong time or it’s given to the wrong patient."

The Bottom line is drugs are dangerous and can and do kill a lot of people, at least 98,000 of them, unnecessarily due to medical mistakes. Add that number to the 106,000 hospitalized patients killed annually by known side-effects of drugs (See JAMA 1998 Apr 15;279(15):1200-1205) when taken in the prescribed amount at the right time by the right patient and you get a total of 204,000 deaths annually. That makes deaths due to Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) the third leading cause of death in America, following closely behind only Heart Disease and Cancer.

Take home message is: Don’t Do Drugs! Get healthy and Stay healthy! Stay out of hospitals! Discover Natural Alternatives!