Making medicines safer for all of us
Adverse drug events are now the fourth leading cause of death in hospitals.
It’s a reasonable bet they are an even greater cause of death in non-hospital settings where there is no one to monitor things going wrong and no one to intervene to save a life. In mental health, for instance, drug-induced problems are the leading cause of death — and these deaths happen in community rather than hospital settings.
There is also another drug crisis — we are failing to discover new drugs. [Read more…]
From the blog…
The Great Silence and Moral Injury
Assuming things around 1998 in the graph below were what most of us would have figured until recently was what normal should look like – by that I mean as we might have expected things to be – there has been a dramatic change since 1998. See Conspiracy of Silence. No one, until recently, would…
The Welfare State Conspiracy of Silence
This graph recreates history. In Britain by 1935, Fertility Rates had fallen below 2.1 – the number of children women have on average – 1.8 and stayed there. The national replacement rate is 2.1. Given the steep slope down from 5.0 to 1.8 over less than 50 years, there is little reason to think in…
Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
I was asked by Mandy Payne at Health Sense to review Bad Therapy due to be published today and agreed because an earlier book by Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage, had worked for me. Reviews of Bad Therapy are tumbling out at the moment – the Daily Mail has two – one by the Mail -…
It’s Health’s Illusions I Recall
There is a core concept shaping the ‘market’ in health, the concept of an assay. Few doctors or patients understand it. This article explains what assays are, how they entered healthcare and the consequences of failing to grasp the role they play. This post by Harriet Vogt and David Healy is an illustrated version of…
Efficiency is not the Supreme Virtue
I was staying in Aubervilliers last November for a “Whistleblowers” Lanceurs d’Alerte conference. Aubervilliers is in the North-East of Paris – not one of the tourist areas. Some French friends suggested the reason Paris was hosting the Olympics was because it offered the authorities an opportunity to flatten that part of the city and regenerate…