I hope you heard the news that MEDICAL ERRORS are now the 3rd leading cause of death in the US.  Just so it sinks in a little bit; there’s heart disease, cancer, and MEDICAL ERRORS as your top 3 most likely ways of dying this year.  What’s the 5th leading cause of death in the US (of course, not listed)?  Non-error effects from medication use.  You got the right diagnosis, the right treatment, and the treatment killed you.

A quarter of a million people will die because someone said “oops, my bad,” that is contracted with your insurance plan.  100k die from the treatment itself.  I started this website to help people create a culture of health so they don’t have to use the healthcare system because of inefficiencies and ineffectiveness.  This latest news takes it to a whole new level.  Let’s say that by you reading my posts it did nothing to prevent your heart disease and cancer risk of dying but it kept you away from taking medications or having surgery…this would be an enormously successful outcome, saving the lives of 350k people each year.

After all, 1/3 of medical spending is for “services that don’t appear to improve health or the quality of care—and may make things worse.”

Are these medical errors from a bunch of stupid doctors writing scripts or doing surgeries with their eyes closed?  I don’t think so.  I think it comes from who influence them the most, the pharmaceutical companies.  Try and find a traditional continuing education credit course for your local MD that isn’t sponsored by a drug company.

Out of the $27.3 BILLION that pharmaceutical companies spend to get drugs in the hands of consumers, only $130 million of it is spent on clinical trials, roughly 0.5% on product research and development.  The remaining 99.5% goes to getting you to buy their product.  Is it possible and even probable that this business model can have influence on medical errors?  Is it possible the doctors are getting information that is incomplete?  If we’re talking about the vaccine side of Big Pharma, they can spend all they want to deliver the message they want you to hear but never have any repercussions if there are injuries and fatalities, completely pardoned by the US government.

It’s so ridiculously bad that one of the top drug commercials you will witness on TV today is a drug to treat the SIDE EFFECTS of another drug (opioid induced constipation).  You can’t poop because of the drugs you take for your pain.  Side effects now have a diagnosis code.  Thanks ICD-10.  Seriously? How are you not pissed about this…like all the time?

The part that worries me the most is that this is an election year.  The candidate that is probably most likely to take the White House next is the one that accepts the most lobby money from the pharmaceutical industry…by a lot.  I personally think we should give this election a rest, just not have anyone in office until we can get a new crop of candidates and let the other 2 branches of the government pick up some slack.  With that said, if Hillary does get in, you can bet there will be policies made that favors and has favors toward Big Pharma.

Thanks for letting me rant a bit, it has been very therapeutic.  Now go get healthy so you don’t have to be a statistic of the 3rd leading cause of death in the US.  Need help?  You know how to find me.