Posted by Tabitha on July 28, 2016, at 12:17:36
In reply to Lou's reply-add up the deaths-one death at a time2 » Tabitha, posted by Lou PIlder on July 27, 2016, at 19:20:17
> Let me help you here.
I don't know if you mean it that way, but it sounds a bit condescending. I'm not asking for your help. I'm trying to sort through your claims about deaths from pharmaceuticals and see whether they agree with best evidence. So far, they don't.
> The list of 200 or so deaths from that 100 day period involved those taking Zoloft. There were deaths of people taking combinations of drugs with Zoloft.It says it is a one year period, not 100 days. I looked at the first page. There are some males over 50 years old that had heart attacks. There are a couple people over 90 years old that died. There's a baby born with multiple cardiac defects. There's a suicide by gunshot. Sure, it's possible zoloft was a cause of those deaths and it's good to maintain data on what medications people were taking when they had adverse events. But those are some very ordinary deaths. If someone is 90 years old, it's not unusual that they die. Likewise it's not unusual for males over 50 to have heart attacks. To implicate zoloft in the deaths you'd need to establish that for given groups of people, ones taking zoloft had more adverse events that ones not taking zoloft, after controlling for other factors. You just can't get that data from a list of adverse events occuring while people are taking zoloft.
> First, you have to start with a death. Then the task of determining if the cause of death was Zoloft. Out of those 200+ deaths listed in the 100 day period, the site does not say which ones were compiled into a data base of deaths caused by Zoloft. To determine which ones were caused by Zoloft requires a pathologist and many others using forensic knowledge involving microscopic study and other forensic tests to determine if there is a separating aspect from the death caused by Zoloft and from other causes. That can be done and you can find it in court cases where they had to prove that, let's say, Zoloft caused the death. You can get the case and the depositions and such and the expert testimony and lab tests and forensic data. Then it is compiled in another data base as a death caused by Zoloft.
So pathologists can look through microscopes and prove that a death was due to zoloft? That just seems wrong. I've never heard of such a case, and if it were true, zoloft would be recalled.
> There are a great many of doctors that accept the 40000/year number as close to actual. I give that number because it is generally accepted, but I think that the real number of deaths per year is 1,000,000 world wide.You have no basis for the one million number, and no, the 40,000 figure is not generally accepted. Just a basic fact check such as I have done will show you that 40,000 is closer to the total number of deaths due to drug poisonings, and that number includes death by opioid analgesics (Rx and street drugs), which is by far the largest class of drugs causing deaths. The next class is benzodiazepenes, and those deaths include both mis-use and use as-prescribed. We know benzos have high potential for mis-use, so it's reasonable to think that as-prescribed use is a smaller number. Thus it is very misleading to continually cite a number that includes opiod drugs and intentional mis-use of drugs here in a context of people using psych meds under a doctors' guidance.
> There are also other ways to determine if a death was caused by a drug. The tobacco companies have for years refused to accept that smoking causes cancer. They say that maybe those that died from cancer and smoked also did other things, such as they used an electric razor and the clippings went into their noses and caused lung cancer. Or they ate apples and such.
Sure, it was outrageous the way tobacco companies suppressed and denied data. But the fact that tobacco companies did that is no proof that it is happening with pharmaceutical drugs today. It's possible, but it's still a pretty outrageous claim, so it's not really OK to throw it around with little to no evidence.
> But there are scientific ways to determine if smoking caused the cancer now just as there are scientific ways to determine if Seroquel caused a death. Those methods I could bring here but the time for me to explain them is not feasible now for me.
What? Are you saying you personally have knowledge of methods not known to the general scientific community? Yet you can't reveal them? If so it sounds rather dubious.
> But I agree with you, that correlation does not prove causation. This is why I have looked deeply into the ehealthme website and find it positively reliable in the statistics that they provide. In fact, so do others as their website is very popular and used by experts.I think that website is popular with people who are looking for information about possible side effects from medication, and it's unfortunate that they present publicly accessible data with the most alarming possible spin on it. Then to avoid FDA censure for false claims, they pose their suggestions as questions such as "Does Zoloft cause Sudden Death?" They are attempting to profit off fear and ignorance, and the saddest thing is they may cause people who could be helped by medication to avoid it due to unfounded fears.
> I have also studied what causes cancer and these drugs can cause cancer.
> So death certificates show the cause of death, like cancer, but they do not state what caused the cancer. Diabetes is caused by many of these drugs and it can be determined if a drug cause the death. I may not have the time to explain that here to you, but you can research it on your own.No, I can't research whether drugs cause cancer or not, and you can't either. We don't have the expertise or the access to research and patient information. We can research the current state of scientific knowledge, which does not indicate that the types of drugs we discuss here (psych meds) are known or suspected to cause cancer.
> The tragedy here is that Mr. Hsiung knows, or should know, as a psychiatrist, all about the aspect of death from these drugs and intercede when others here advocate what could kill others. I try to do what he should do, and those that are killed here but can't be here all the time, their blood will not be upon me.
> Lou
>So you think Dr Bob intentionally recommends people take drugs that he knows will kill them? That would make him pretty evil. Do you ever question whether you might be mistaken or even paranoid? That is what most people are going to think of such beliefs.
poster:Tabitha
thread:1090852
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20151112/msgs/1090937.html