by Rhoda Wilson, Expose News:
Peter Gotzsche was named Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen in 2010 and was the co founder of the Cochrane Collaboration which was for a long time considered to be the world’s preeminent independent medical research organisation Source. In the position that he has been in and the knowledge he would have accumulated, when Gotzsche writes an article with the title ‘Prescription Drugs Are the Leading Cause of Death‘ and ‘psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death,’ we should all heed his warning that most drug deaths are preventable and most people that have died a prescribed drug death didn’t need them in the first place.
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Gøtzsche who has been known to be an outspoken critic of the corruption of science by pharmaceutical companies for years has published more than 97 papers in the “big five” medical journals (JAMA, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine) and authored books on medical issues including Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime. Source
‘We could easily get our drug pandemic under control,’ says Peter who says that this is the tragedy, ‘but when our politicians act, they usually make matters worse’ due to being so heavily lobbied by the drug industry which has made drug regulation ‘much more permissive than it was in the past.’
Read more about the subject from Dr Peter Gotzsche who authored the article below which was originally published by The Brownstone Institute.
Prescription Drugs Are the Leading Cause of Death.
And psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death.
BY PETER C. GØTZSCHE The Brownstone Institute
Overtreatment with drugs kills many people, and the death rate is increasing. It is therefore strange that we have allowed this long-lasting drug pandemic to continue, and even more so because most of the drug deaths are easily preventable.
In 2013, I estimated that our prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer,1 and in 2015, that psychiatric drugs alone are also the third leading cause of death.2 However, in the US, it is commonly stated that our drugs are “only” the fourth leading cause of death.3,4 This estimate was derived from a 1998 meta-analysis of 39 US studies where monitors recorded all adverse drug reactions that occurred while the patients were in hospital, or which were the reason for hospital admission.5
This methodology clearly underestimates drug deaths. Most people who are killed by their drugs die outside hospitals, and the time people spent in hospitals was only 11 days on average in the meta-analysis.5 Moreover, the meta-analysis only included patients who died from drugs that were properly prescribed, not those who died as a result of errors in drug administration, noncompliance, overdose, or drug abuse, and not deaths where the adverse drug reaction was only possible.5
Many people die because of errors, e.g. simultaneous use of contraindicated drugs, and many possible drug deaths are real. Moreover, most of the included studies are very old, the median publication year being 1973, and drug deaths have increased dramatically over the last 50 years. As an example, 37,309 drug deaths were reported to the FDA in 2006 and 123,927 ten years later, which is 3.3 times as many.6
In hospital records and coroners’ reports, deaths linked to prescription drugs are often considered to be from natural or unknown causes. This misconception is particularly common for deaths caused by psychiatric drugs.2,7 Even when young patients with schizophrenia suddenly drop dead, it is called a natural death. But it is not natural to die young and it is well known that neuroleptics can cause lethal heart arrhythmias.
Many people die from the drugs they take without raising any suspicion that it could be an adverse drug effect. Depression drugs kill many people, mainly among the elderly, because they can cause orthostatic hypotension, sedation, confusion, and dizziness. The drugs double the risk of falls and hip fractures in a dose-dependent manner,8,9 and within one year after a hip fracture, about one-fifth of the patients will have died. As elderly people often fall anyway, it is not possible to know if such deaths are drug deaths.
Another example of unrecognised drug deaths is provided by non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). They have killed hundreds of thousands of people,1 mainly through heart attacks and bleeding stomach ulcers, but these deaths are unlikely to be coded as adverse drug reactions, as such deaths also occur in patients who do not take the drugs.
The 1998 US meta-analysis estimated that 106,000 patients die every year in hospital because of adverse drug effects (a 0.32% death rate).5 A carefully done Norwegian study examined 732 deaths that occurred in a two-year period ending in 1995 at a department of internal medicine, and it found that there were 9.5 drug deaths per 1,000 patients (a 1% death rate).10 This is a much more reliable estimate, as drug deaths have increased markedly. If we apply this estimate to the US, we get 315,000 annual drug deaths in hospitals. A review of four newer studies, from 2008 to 2011, estimated that there were over 400,000 drug deaths in US hospitals.11
Drug usage is now so common that newborns in 2019 could be expected to take prescription drugs for roughly half their lives in the US.12 Moreover, polypharmacy has been increasing.12
How Many People Are Killed by Psychiatric Drugs?
If we want to estimate the death toll of psychiatric drugs, the most reliable evidence we have are the placebo-controlled randomised trials. But we need to consider their limitations.
First, they usually run for only a few weeks even though most patients take the drugs for many years.13,14
Second, polypharmacy is common in psychiatry, and this increases the risk of dying. As an example, the Danish Board of Health has warned that adding a benzodiazepine to a neuroleptic increases mortality by 50-65%.15
Third, half of all deaths are missing in published trial reports.16 For dementia, published data show that for every 100 people treated with a newer neuroleptic for ten weeks, one patient is killed.17 This is an extremely high death rate for a drug, but FDA data on the same trials show it is twice as high, namely two patients killed per 100 after ten weeks.18 And if we extend the observation period, the death toll becomes even higher. A Finnish study of 70,718 community-dwellers newly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease reported that neuroleptics kill 4-5 people per 100 annually compared to patients who were not treated.19
