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Quotes about Drug Errors from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"Paulson tells me thatVistA also helps reduce drug errors. In the old days, she says, nurses kept track of which patients needed which drugs and at what dose on three-by-five cards or sheets of paper, which they kept stashed in their coat pockets. Today, VistA keeps track for them. She motions toward a nurse who has been sitting near her dozing patient. The nurse's computer is beeping; it's time for another dose of a drug. The nurse goes to the man's side and says quietly, "I'm going to scan your ID band." The patient's eyes flutter open, and he lifts his left hand, shakily, from the bed." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "The Institute of Medicine calculated that drug errors alone add on average nearly $5,000 to the cost of every hospital admission, or about $2.8 million annually for a seven hundred-bed teaching hospital. Why are so many errors committed? To much of the public, medical error seems to be a problem primarily of bad doctoring. We think physicians and nurses who make mistakes are either incompetent or uncaring, or some lethal combination of both." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "The hospital scrapped it in 2003, after complaints swelled into a full-blown rebellion among physicians, at least one of whom was caught making routine drug errors and perhaps didn't appreciate being exposed. Other doctors simply didn't want to make the change from pen and paper to keyboard, and at least six other hospitals have shut down computerized drug-dispensing systems. Kaiser Permanente, in California, is currently struggling to get all the bugs out of its new four-billion-dollar electronic medical-records system." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Paulson tells me thatVistA also helps reduce drug errors. In the old days, she says, nurses kept track of which patients needed which drugs and at what dose on three-by-five cards or sheets of paper, which they kept stashed in their coat pockets. Today, VistA keeps track for them. She motions toward a nurse who has been sitting near her dozing patient. The nurse's computer is beeping; it's time for another dose of a drug. The nurse goes to the man's side and says quietly, "I'm going to scan your ID band." The patient's eyes flutter open, and he lifts his left hand, shakily, from the bed." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "The Institute of Medicine calculated that drug errors alone add on average nearly $5,000 to the cost of every hospital admission, or about $2.8 million annually for a seven hundred-bed teaching hospital. Why are so many errors committed? To much of the public, medical error seems to be a problem primarily of bad doctoring. We think physicians and nurses who make mistakes are either incompetent or uncaring, or some lethal combination of both." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"Multiplied by the fatality rate of 14% (that Leape used in 1994)16 we arrive at an annual death rate of 420,000 for drug errors and medical errors combined. If we put this number in place of Lazorou's 106,000 drug errors and the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) 98,000 medical errors (which may have a drug error overlap with Lazorou's study), we could add another 216,000 deaths making a total of 999,936 deaths annually." - Gary Null PhD, Carolyn Dean MD ND, Martin Feldman MD, Debora Rasio MD, Dorothy Smith PhD., Death by Medicine (Get the book.)

"I •IATROGENIC DISEASES/Physician-induced illnesses Affect 1 in25 hospital patients out of 31 million admissions annually, killing four times the number of deaths from annual highway traffic accidents; a hidden, unspoken-of epidemic of surgical or drug errors, side effects, infections, misdiagnoses, incompetence, and negligence. Hundreds of mistakes occur every day in a major hospital and go unreported, uninvestigated, and uncompensated for. "Hospitals are hazardous, and medical care is dangerous, according to one Harvard University study." - Joseph E. Mario, Anti-Aging Manual: The Encyclopedia of Natural Health (Get the book.)

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