Medical Error CrisisWritten by Anna Henningsgaard
The unfortunate truth about medical errors is that they plague poor and uninsured, reflecting great medical inequality in our country. For those who do not consider medical errors to be a problem, consider this: medical errors kill between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans every year. This reflects fact that medical errors kill more people per year than breast cancer, AIDS, or motor vehicle accidents. Doctors complain of inflated medical malpractice insurace costs, but medication-related errors for hospitalized patients cost around $2 billion annually.The 41 million uninsured Americans exhibit consistently worse clinical outcomes than insured patients with same maladies and are at increased risk for dying prematurely. Only 55% of patients in a recent random sample of adults received recommended care in treatments and preventative treatments, and lag between discovery of a new medicine and its adoption by doctors is 17 years. You could suffer from an ailment and not receive proper treatment simply because your doctor is not well educated about treatments that were invented almost two decades ago! The problem is not restricted to administering too little medication. Every year millions of people are unnecessarily hospitalized. Using excessive, unnecessary antibiotics to kill infections outright is a widespread practice that, while curing individual patients, cause strains of a disease to mutate and grow stronger, resulting in more serious infections for entire population. In 1993, excessive antibiotics were prescribed in 20 million cases, and by now that number has multiplied.
| | Lotronex Lawyer: Lotronex Side Effects LawsuitWritten by Anna Henningsgaard
Even in clinical trials, Lotronex displayed a tendency towards causing ischemic colitis in patients. From February in which Lotronex was approved until June, FDA received seven reports of serious complications of constipation leading to hospitalization. Surgery was required to relieve some cases of extreme Lotronex constipation. Lotronex Medication Guides were issued under regulations that became effective in 1999 when Lotronex patients ended up in hospitalization and requiring surgical procedures for constipation. Since Lotronex is a drug used to treat diarrhea, these surgeries were obviously not necessary to treat conditions held before taking drug.Despite FDA’s issuing of this safety information about Lotronex, patients kept filing severe adverse event reports of ischemic colitis, complications of constipation, death reports, and complications requiring blood transfusions. The FDA recalled Lotronex on November 2000, just nine months after approval. In 2002, FDA announced approval of a supplemental New Drug Application that allows restricted marketing of Lotronex to treat only women with severe diarrhea-predominant irritable bowel syndrom. The approval of Lotronex includes a risk management program to ensure patients and physicians are fully informed of risks and possible benefits of Lotronex. Patients using Lotronex must sign a contract with their doctors stating that they understand risk of serious constipation that could result in surgery, blood transfusion, or death.
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