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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Medically Assisted Death in Canada
February, 25, 2021 | 8 Comments

Policy Options, a Canadian forum, published the piece below by Jocelyn Downie, David Wright and Mona Gupta, all of whom I know, as a contribution to a wider debate on the Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) legislation currently under review in Canada, and especially the question of where does mental illness fit into this mix.  […]

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MAiD in Canada: Enduring Sexual Dysfunctions
February, 19, 2021 | 21 Comments

See accompanying MAiD in Canada and TRD. Illustration: Lost in Medication © created by Billiam James Canada put Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) legislation in place in June 2016. This allowed for medical assistance in dying in cases where death was reasonably foreseeable. In 2019, in Truchon v Attorney General of Canada, the Superior Court […]

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Sex and Evidence Based Medicine
February, 12, 2021 | 10 Comments

The University of British Columbia in Vancouver hosts The Therapeutics Initiative an independent group who evaluate all medicines for effectiveness, harms and value in a regular series of Drugs Bulletins dealing with new drugs or emerging problems with older drugs. They were set up in 1994 just when evaluations of this type and Drugs Bulletins […]

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High Noon: Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My….?
February, 7, 2021 | 24 Comments

In early December 2020, Ian and Tania Morgan had to attend the inquest of their son Samuel in Swansea, South Wales.  Sam died in January 2020, a week after he had been put on citalopram by his family doctor, Dr Adams. Sam was pretty close to a healthy volunteer. A 25 year old, sporty, successful […]

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Shipwreck of the Singular: Healthcare’s Castaways
February, 1, 2021 | 18 Comments

Shipwreck of the Singular, which Samizdat has just published, took more time to write than all my other books combined. The others tumbled out – often in just a few weeks. Unpublishable Pharmageddon took 3 weeks. But it then took 4 years to find a publisher. I took on an agent to help get a […]

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