David Healy

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...]

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Rest in Dissent
January, 19, 2019 | 9 Comments

Fifty years ago today, January 19, Jan Palach died.  He had set fire to himself 3 days earlier in Wenceslas Square in Prague in protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. The spot was close to Charles University where Jan Hus had begun a resistance to religious oppression 5 centuries before that helped ignite the […]

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Fake Science, Fake Religion or Fake What?
January, 14, 2019 | 19 Comments

There has been increasing brouhaha about Fake News of late. In the general media, Facebook are apparently going to introduce panels of reviewers to take down posts that contain fake material. In the academic media, doctors are told not to believe what they hear in the media about the adverse effects of drugs – See […]

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Making Medicines Safer for All of US
December, 30, 2018 | 32 Comments

Editorial Note: Aberystwyth on the West Coast of Wales is one of the best places in the world to see starlings murmurate.  Clive King from the Computer Science Department there also organises TedX talks and  on November 24 convened a panel of speakers to talk about murmurating swallows, ambivalent motherhood and making medicines safer among […]

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Simony
December, 24, 2018 | 5 Comments

Before Google the Bible could be pretty confusing. Peter seemed to be a bedrock, a fixed point in the New Testament narrative.  Your name will be Peter which means Rock. This of course means that he had another name before being renamed.  Looks like it was Simon.  So at various points we have references to […]

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A strong and independent research community to the benefit of… patients.
December, 18, 2018 | 15 Comments

Seven weeks ago in the wake of Peter Gøtzsche’s dismissal by the Rigshospitalitet, I wrote to Ellen Trane Nørby the Danish Minister for Health.  The letter is HERE.  She replied on December 11 – See HERE. The response below was sent yesterday, along with the hard copies noted and link to the Welsh Senate proceedings. December 17th […]

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