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…
Unsafe Safety
On March 20th, Senators Tina Smith and Ben Lujan, and Representatives Andrea Salinas and Becca Balint, sent a letter to the Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy, expressing concern about his promotion of disproven and outright false theories about mental health medications. In separate comments, Senator Smith indicated…
Six Weeks to Recover a Grin
I am among those who can be blamed for the disastrous MHRA supported drug label and messaging for antidepressants, along with Guideline recommendations that tell doctors and patients that it can take 6 weeks for antidepressant induced recovery to take place. This idea has been interpreted by MHRA and lots of psychiatrists and family doctors,…
An Appleby a Day Keeps the Doctor Away
Tangled up in Bureaucracy flagged a Signal for the Goose Signal for the Gander as a sequel. That was before the Gary Bullivant comments on Tangled up in Bureaucracy. If you don’t normally read comments on post, the Bullivant-Kingston comments are in this link; they are worth reading. GB’s comments fit nicely in with a…
Tangled up in Bureaucracy
In response to Thomas Kingston’s death, Katy Skerrett, the coroner at his inquest, wrote to the MHRA (Britain’s medicines regulator) and to NICE (Britain’s guideline body) suggesting that their communications around antidepressant hazards appeared to downplay the risks of suicidal reactions to SSRI antidepressants, perhaps contributing to his death. See Aunts, Ants and Regulators, and…
The Respiratory Syncytial Virus Challenge
This post by Peter Selley centres on a Moderna RSV vaccine trial, the Rhyme trial, in young babies that was stopped last year when 7 out of 40 babies between 5 and 8 months of age developed severe lung disease, compared to 1 in 20 controls. Moderna had good reason to think its vaccine could…