Hospital Errors Kill Well Over 180,000 Americans Annually – Why are
Super-Safe Supplements and Natural Health Under Attack?
November 05 2012
Story at-a-glance
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Consumer Reports' investigation into hospital safety shows some
of the most well-known hospitals received the worst ratings.
Sacred Heart of Chicago was ranked the most dangerous in the
country. A clinic in Billings, Montana was ranked the safest,
based on six criteria, including hospital-acquired infections,
over-treatment, and death rates
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More than 2.25 million Americans will likely die from medical
harm in this decade – the equivalent of wiping out the entire
populations of North Dakota, Rhode Island, and Vermont
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Recent data from the UK shows that compared to supplements, you
are 900 times more likely to die from food poisoning, and
300,000 times more likely to die from a preventable medical
injury during a hospital stay in the UK
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Adverse reactions to pharmaceutical drugs are 62,000 times more
likely to kill you than nutritional supplements
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Senators Durbin and Richard Blumenthal have sent letters to
three natural and herbal products organizations, stating they
are “deeply concerned about the poor manufacturing standards
that expose consumers to potentially serious health risks.” The
Senators have requested information about the “industry's plans
for improving the successful adoption of current manufacturing
practices”
By Dr. Mercola
When Consumer Reports speaks, people listen – and this
time the consumer advocacy agency is advising you on where to get
your care – or not – if you need to go to the hospital. It's the
first time Consumer Reports has investigated hospital
safety,1
and the results show hospital ratings don't always match public
opinions. Some of the most well-known hospitals got the worst
ratings.
Except for the Mayo Clinic's various campuses, which have
exceptionally good scores, others like Mass General and Mount Sinai
in New York, didn't rate as well as you might expect. One hospital,
Sacred Heart of Chicago, scoring an abysmal 16 on a 100-point safety
scale was ranked the most dangerous in the country. A clinic in
Billings, Montana scored the highest. Hospitals were ranked
according to six critera:2
- Infections
- Communications about safety issues
- The degree to which you come right back in the hospital
after you've been discharged
- Situations in which too many imaging tests that expose you
to radiation are being done
- Common complications in unsafe hospital
- Death rates for several conditions
An Epidemic of Health Care Harm...
"Infections, surgical mistakes, and other medical
harm contributes to the deaths of 180,000 hospital patients a
year, according to projections based on a 2010 report
from the Department of Health and Human Services.
Another 1.4 million are seriously hurt by their hospital care.
And those figures apply only to Medicare patients.
What happens to other people is less clear because most
hospital errors go unreported and hospitals report on only a
fraction of things that can go wrong.
'There is an epidemic of health-care harm,' says Rosemary
Gibson, a patient-safety advocate and author. More than 2.25
million Americans will probably die from medical harm in this
decade, she says. 'That's like wiping out the entire populations
of North Dakota, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It's a man-made
disaster.'
... 'Hospitals haven't given safety the attention it
deserves,' says Peter Pronovost, M.D., senior vice president for
patient safety and quality at Johns Hopkins Medicine in
Baltimore. Nor has the government, he says. 'Medical harm is
probably one of the three leading causes of death in the U.S.,
but the government doesn't adequately track it as it does deaths
from automobiles, plane crashes, and cancer. It's appalling.'"
The above was written in Consumer Reports:3
To review the full listing of their safety scores, you need to be a
Consumer Reports subscriber. However, there are also other
sources that can help you evaluate the safety of a hospital, such
as:
On Calling the Kettle Black...
Statistics like these make safety allegations against alternative
forms of health care, including the use of herbal remedies and
supplements in lieu of drugs, all the more ludicrous. Natural health
modalities have repeatedly come under attack as being inherently
risky. Risky compared to what? Clearly, these people do not know
what they're talking about when they claim conventional health care
is superior to natural, holistic modalities.
Superior in what way? Putting you out of your misery quicker?
One such misguided person is Dick Durbin, current state senator
of my home state, Illinois, which, as we now know is also home to
the most dangerous hospital in the United States. I find this to be
particularly ironic since Senator Durbin is a staunch pro-pharma
supporter who time and again has tried to destroy alternative health
and eliminate supplements. Earlier this summer, he tried to sneak in
a last-minute anti-supplement amendment into an FDA bill.
Fortunately, over 100,000 Americans called their Congressmen within
24 hours to defeat the amendment.
The Alliance for Natural Health reported:4
"One of the things we found alarming in this amendment
saga was the amount of misinformation in Sen. Durbin's speech on
the Senate floor... Sen. Durbin [said], 'No one tests dietary
supplements... Companies that make these products may test them
if they wish, there's no requirement under law that they test
them, and there's certainly no agency of government that tests
dietary supplements... There's just no testing involved.'
This is completely untrue –
supplement companies, by law, must comply with the Dietary
Supplement Current Good Manufacturing Practices5
(CGMPs) and must conduct testing throughout the production
process as well as testing the finished product for quality
control. As with the pharmaceutical industry, the burden is on
supplement companies to test their own products, because in the
end they are liable should FDA choose to take enforcement action
against them.
One reason we are so concerned about legislation like
Sen. Durbin's is that it is clearly intended to put us on a
slippery slope toward a supplement pre-approval system – similar
to the system being used by the European Union, where only those
vitamins and minerals on the approved list may be used in food
supplements, and only in very limited amounts. For example, if a
supplement contains more beta carotene than is present in half a
large carrot, it is banned. A regulatory framework like the EU's
is exactly what Sen. Durbin wants."
Supplements Industry has an Unmatched Safety Record
Durbin is still on the war path against supplements, despite the
fact that recent investigations in the US and the UK have concluded
that supplements and herbal remedies have a sterling safety record.
The UK-based, international campaign group, the Alliance for Natural
Health International (ANH-Intl) recently revealed data6
showing that compared to supplements, an individual is:
The data, which was collected from official sources in the UK and
EU, demonstrate that both food supplements and herbal remedies are
in the 'super-safe' category of individual risk – meaning risk of
death from their consumption is less than 1 in 10 million.
Similarly, the latest data from the U.S. National Poison Data
System (2010 report),7
NO deaths were attributable to vitamin and mineral supplements that
year. And, as noted by Orthomolecular Medicine News Service
last year,8
Americans easily take more than 60 billion doses of nutritional
supplements every year, and with zero related deaths this is an
outstanding safety record:
"Well over half of the U.S. population takes daily
nutritional supplements. Even if each of those people took only
one single tablet daily, that makes 165,000,000 individual doses
per day, for a total of over 60 billion doses annually. Since
many persons take far more than just one single vitamin or
mineral tablet, actual consumption is considerably higher, and
the safety of nutritional supplements is all the more
remarkable.
Over 60 billion doses of vitamin and mineral supplements
per year in the USA, and not a single fatality. Not one. If
vitamin and mineral supplements are allegedly so 'dangerous,' as
the FDA and news media so often claim, then where are the
bodies?"
Senators Durbin, Blumenthal "Deeply Concerned" about Poor
Manufacturing Standards
While supplements may be one of the safest industries, there's
certainly room for improvement, especially when it comes to quality
standards. The good news is that even when quality is lacking, the
risk you take relates more to the fact that the product will not
provide you with the same benefits as a high-quality product might,
as opposed to posing a life-threatening risk to your health – like
drugs do. Still, the fact that you're more likely to die from
drowning in your bathtub than from a supplement or herbal remedy,
supplements are still being attacked as "dangerous."
If Senator Durbin truly cared about the safety of individuals,
then he should be spending more time addressing the abysmal safety
record of our hospitals, and the rampant prescriptions of dangerous
drugs. Especially since the most dangerous hospital in the US is
right in his backyard. But no. He's got smaller fish to fry.
Senators Durbin and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) recently sent off
letters to the Natural Products Association (NPA), the Council for
Responsible Nutrition (CRN) and the American Herbal Products
Association (AHPA), stating:
"We are deeply concerned about the poor manufacturing
standards that expose consumers to potentially serious health
risks. To ensure consumer safety, we are eager to hear of the
industry's plans for improving the successful adoption of
current manufacturing practices."
The hubbub stems from a June 30 article in the Chicago
Tribune, which claims:9
"Federal inspections of companies that make dietary
supplements – from multivitamins and calcium chews to capsules
of echinacea and bodybuilding powders – reveal serious and
widespread manufacturing problems in a $28 billion industry that
sells products consumed by half of all Americans. In the last
four years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has found
violations of manufacturing rules in half of the nearly 450
dietary supplement firms it has inspected, according to agency
officials."
The article goes on to describe how supplements are produced in
"unsanitary factories." One New Jersey-based protein powder
manufacturer is alleged to have been mixing powders and supplements
in "a facility infested with rodents, rodent feces and urine."
Serious supplement adverse events are so rare that media and
supplement critics repeatedly roll out Total Body Formula's problems
from back in 2008 (as Dateline NBC did in its March 18, 2012,
broadcast) to beat the anti-supplement drum. The Tribune's
reporter has a history of launching attacks against "alternative"
medicine. The reporter's inclusion of deaths linked to cough syrup
made by a Panamanian pharmaceutical company in 2006 adds further
proof of bias.
Beware the Double Standards
I'd like to remind everyone that the FDA allows all manner of
contaminations in the processed foods you consume every day, and it
thinks nothing of it.
For example, up to six percent of chips are allowed to have rot
from pre- or post-harvest infection. Acceptable levels of mold go as
low as 15 percent in canned tomatoes to as high as 45 percent for
ketchup. Up to 30 fly eggs per every 100 grams of tomato sauce is
okay, as is two maggots per every 100 grams of tomato juice. The FDA
also will not mandate action unless 10 or more whole or equivalent
Drosophila flies and 35 of its eggs are found per 8 ounces of
raisins.
Ground turkey is allowed up to 49.9% positive testing for
salmonella under USDA guidelines, with ground chicken allowed up to
44.6%. When it comes to food, a certain amount of bugs and
other contaminants is considered safe by the FDA. I absolutely agree
that the supplement industry needs to work hard to ensure
high-quality products of high purity.
However, there's no need to try to shut down the entire industry
as unsafe, as all available data attests to the contrary! Can you
get ill from a supplement or herb? Yes. But your chances of
suffering a serious side effect or death from a drug is
astronomically higher. Again, your risk of dying from an adverse
drug effect is 62,000 times higher than that of a supplement. Your
chances of dying from food poisoning is also FAR greater than having
a lethal reaction to a supplement.
In the end it comes down to keeping things in perspective. If
Congress wants to protect us from health care harm, they need to get
their priorities in order. In response to Senator Durbin's letter,
the Natural Products Association replied, in part:10
"As the leading representative of the dietary supplement
industry with over 1,900 members, including suppliers and
retailers of vitamins and other dietary supplements, NPA has
been the leader in educating the dietary supplement industry
about current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMPs). GMP
compliance is a serious issue and NPA has taken major steps to
ensure our members are in compliance. NPA agrees consumers
should have access to products that are safe and wholesome and
we do not make excuses for any instances of non-compliance.
However, NPA believes the FDA's reckless comments in the
Chicago Tribune article distort the full picture of our
membership's overall safety record. In fact, supplements have an
excellent safety record, but we appreciate this opportunity to
provide more information to you..."
Although I do not promote the use of many supplements in general,
believing it is far better to get your nutrition from food, there
are exceptions to this rule, and if you choose to use them in lieu
of drug therapy, you're certainly reducing your risk of serious side
effects. It is prudent, however, to make sure you're using a
high-quality product. Not only will this protect you from any
potential harmful effects from contaminants, but such products will
also offer the greatest possible benefits so that you're not wasting
your money on an ineffective product.
Big businesses have been buying up emerging supplement
manufacturers similar to what we've witnessed in the organic
industry. Nearly 70 percent of American adults are now taking
supplements, and you can bet the drug industry and a few politicians
will work hard to make this another model of control and profits for
a few elite businesses. I'd recommend keeping close tabs on CT Sen.
Richard Blumenthal and IL Sen. Dick Durbin. If you live in Illinois,
please ask him about his inaccurate statements on the senate floor.
You can reach them here:
Sen. Richard Blumenthal:
90 State House Square, 10th Flr.
Hartford, CT
06103
Phone: (860) 258-6940
Fax: (860) 258-6958
Sen. Dick Durbin:
230 South Dearborn Street Suite 3892
Chicago, IL 60604
Phone:(312) 353-4952
Fax: (312) 353-0150
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