4th largest killer

100,000 people die each year from prescription drugs, side effects, wrong usage, wrong dosage, making this the 4th largest killer.

www.healthfreedomusa.org

You are right MC to make this post. It is becoming a national epidemic, the abuse now of prescrition pain meds(narcotics). As now there is a big deal going on over "pain control". Nurses are made take continuing education now on pain control here. You can get a Rx for a narcotic quicker than anything now. I can recall back 10 years or so, narcotics were not handed out like candy by MD's. I mean you had to really have pain, now it's a twitch and bam.you get vicodin 7.5mg. Hospitals hard hit IV dilaudid for pain control, and wow once you get that on board people are lovin it People will say they have pain to get narcotics to sleep and depend of it nightly. They use pain narcs for depression.take me away vicodin. People using duragesic(fentenyl) patches by taking an insulin syringe drawing the gel med out and IV injecting themselves....oops they died! Had one patient stealing duragesic patches off another patient and chewing on the "used patch" to get more high. It's unbelievable what these people will do for prescrition pain killers. People do not realize the damage these medications do their veins, when given IV, when received over & over......Don't get me wrong there are many well deserving patients that are in great need of pain control...but it's the abusers that create the issues.and it's the abusers that wind up deceased from it or have severe irrreversible organ damage.....It's a sad situation for all......and it's getting worse, as now kids are raiding the medicine cupboards.. One has to use ID to get over the counter sudafed, the high Mg of mucinex, because the ingredients in these antihistamines, are componets of crystal meth....

Of course there are the medication errors that are made frequenlty also. wrong med, wrong dose, wrong route of administration, not to leave out the wrong patient. Not sure if CCMH has or will institute this, but here, they use scanners on the patients armbands for medications, must match the ordered medication, doctors will soon have to be putting orders in via computer no handwriting, the larger MD offices here, have all their RX's printed out via computer and then the MD just signs the RX. Florida now has a mandatory 2 hour continuing education requirement for nurses "medication errors" must be taken for license renewal. All these interventions will help, but there will still be error someway.

Once again I'd compliment you on bringing an important issue up to discuss.