A special editorial written by Donald Wright from Harvard University and published in the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics pointed out that 90% of all new drugs approved by the FDA over the past 30 years are little or no more effective than drugs that are already on the market! They also commented that the safety of new FDA approved drugs is low. There are 53,000 admissions every week and 2400 deaths weekly in the US from the expected side effects of medications. When you add in the hospitalizations and deaths from the misuse of pharmaceutical drugs, there are millions of hospitalizations and about 400,000 deaths annually. This makes pharmaceutical drugs the 3rd most common cause of death in the US!
The author goes on to comment that there are severe conflicts of interest between big pharma and the FDA that seriously compromise the safety of pharmaceutical drugs. This, of course, poses huge problems for the doctors and patients when it comes to patient care.
