My local newspaper, _The Youngstown Vindicator_ carried the
following item on prescription drugs entitled "A Danger in
Hospitals." Not very positive but interesting.
Scripps Howard: Hospitals are killing more than 100,000
people a year through the drugs they give them, although health
practitioners are administering these drugs properly. That's one
conclusion of a study showing that almost 7 percent of all
hospital patients can expect adverse reactions to drugs even when
the prescription and dosage are correct. The study is useful
because it highlights the danger, points to some steps that
should be taken to reduce it, and also because it should help
make Americans more sophisticated about the risks that yet
accompany the miracle of modem medicine.
Side effects: The study underlines facts that most of us may
never have imagined, namely that the side effects of drugs make
about 2.2 million hospital patients seriously sick every year and
could be as high as the fourth-leading cause of death in the
nation, right behind heart disease, cancer and stroke. There's
no one much to blame, however. Researchers, who examined data
collected over a 30-year period, focused on cases in which
approved procedures were followed, not on accidents or instances
of laxity.
It doesn't follow that nothing can be done. The authors of
the study note that, by more carefully tracking and reporting on
drug reactions, hospitals can help identify more precisely those
drugs that may pose the most serious problems, those patients
most susceptible to certain physical responses and the most
likely drug side effects. Some say, too, that physicians can
search better for allergies and that some hospitals can do a
better job of in-house communication about different drugs given
to the same patient.
Risk: But despite such efforts, many drugs will continue to
carry with them a risk that, at least at this point of
pharmaceutical know- how, remains irreducible. Because the drugs
save far more lives than they threaten, it will often be
necessary for physicians and their patients to decide what risk
is worse, taking a drug or treating a disease with something
considerably less than the most effective remedy.
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Sid Roberts 68/dx3
[log in to unmask] Youngstown, Ohio
