Properly Prescribed Drugs Kill How Many Each Year?!

Scott: I think I've heard you say upwards of 15 to 20 percent of drugs on the market are unsafe?  So up to one fifth.  How many deaths occur in the United States because of drugs that doctors are properly prescribing. 

Jonathan Emord: Well it's hard to say, exactly how many.  But it is likely between 110 or 220 thousand people a year are dying from drugs that are properly prescribed by physicians but that have serious adverse consequences associated with them.  Certainly adverse consequences in many instances that are far greater than any person with knowledge would accept.  You would rather have your chronic ailment or your temporary and very inconvenient ailment than a drug that could kill you in one in five cases or one in ten or one in twenty cases.  

Avandia is a type two diabetes drug and it's a hard, toxic drug.  And that drug, made by GlaxoSmithKline, came under heat when Congresswoman Waters from California, went to her doctor, was told that she had type two diabetes and he prescribed to her Avandia.  She was on Avandia for a while and then she started to experience these strange heart palpitations, shortness of breath.  Went in to see her doctor, they had her assessed by a cardiologist.  Although she had no problem with her heart up to that point, she suddenly discovered she had a heart murmur and that it was interfering with her, you know, there might be heart valve problems she was experiencing.  

So she went back to her primary doctor, and he said 'look, this is not the first time I've received a complaint of this kinds.  I'm seriously suspicious the type two diabetes drug I gave you is the responsible vehicle for causing this, so I'm shifting you to another drug, but I think that may be the source of it.'  She's on the Energy and Commerce committee, which has oversight over the FDA and become quite upset.  And the Energy and Commerce Committee began to hold hearings on Avandia.  They discovered all this correspondence between GlaxoSmithKline's executives and senior management at the FDA during the review process of Avandia where they were dissuading the FDA from having certain medical reviewers examine their drug, encouraging them to have other medical reviewers who they suspected would produce more favorable results to look at the drug.  Cooperative FDA management were assisting in that way.   And there's all sorts of rubbish that goes on between these parties, very disgusting corruption.  

And then there was this campaign of suppression of the adverse information that was undertaken by GlaxoSmithKline.  All of this came to the subject of grave concern by the committee, and they asked the FDA commissioner to take the drug off the market.  The FDA commissioner then held review... formed a review panel and held hearings on this.  And the determination of the review panel, even though they were all biased, was that yes, the drug is heart toxic, but no, the drug shouldn't be removed from the market.  The FDA commissioner looked at it and agreed.  The drug is toxic but should remain on the market.  She restricted its use those that are already prescribed the drug.  This is a move from Avandia... er... GlaxoSmithKline from suffering a dramatic reduction of market share.  This way, because there's already this negative publicity and all that's associated with it, they know the drug is going to be phased out.  This gives GlaxoSmithKline a long, four or five year interval to experience a slow reduction in sales as opposed to a dramatic cut off.  Meanwhile, those who are at highest risk of heart toxic affects, those already on Avandia, are allowed to remain on the drug, by the FDA.  So they can thank the FDA for their heart ailments.