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…
Health a Privilege of Wealth
This post was written 5 years ago. It is a sequel to a lecture posted last week on RxISK with its comments – Are Healthcare and Science Compatible? The comments brought out how we now have a system that gaslights both patients and doctors leading to tensions on all sides as this post illustrates. It…
The Once and Future Pharmacopsychology
Emil Kraepelin’s famous Textbook created modern psychiatry a hundred and thirty years ago. After the World Wars, Freud’s influence grew and his thinking dominated the US mental health scene after World War II. Nearly 90 years after Kraepelin established his framework, US psychiatry dramatically swept Freud away under the influence of a group of psychiatrists…
I Come to Praise SSRIs not to Bury Them
This talk was given in Maastricht at the invitation of David Linden, Scientific Director of the Mental Health and Neuroscience Research Institute on November 27 and again to a group of Primary Care Doctors in Sweden at the invitation of André Marx on Nov 28. There were some great questions afterwards. This post gives the…
Authenticity Inc meets Grok
Two weeks ago, RxISK ran Authenticity Inc., a post by Johanna Ryan, which tackled a growing story – the exponentially escalating use of SSRIs among Tik-Toxing and Instagramming Gen Zs, more women than men. A generation for whom these drugs were never approved and for whom SSRIs come with Black Box warnings for suicide.…
Artificial Intelligence Triggers a Tsunami
This post follows on from Miracles of Artificial Intelligence and Artificial I. The trigger was an intervention by Chris Dubey, who earlier this year wrote an article on ECT (electroconvulsive therapy – Shock Treatment) for the International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine, which was sent to me for review. Most people, whether familiar…