The cost of not taking your medicine (is less than the cost of taking it)

Submitted to the Globe and Mail newspaper, but not published, as usual when I criticize the medical establishment.


A recent Globe and Mail article, “The cost of not taking your medicine”, estimates that 125,000 deaths occur every year in the USA due to people not taking their medicine. Ironically, way back in 2000, the even more prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association published an estimate that 106,000 people die each year from properly (!) prescribed medications in hospitals. Given increases in population and pharmaceutical use, that’s roughly the same number. But if you include improperly prescribed medications (wrong drug, wrong dose, etc), over-the-counter drugs and drugs prescribed outside hospitals (via a GP, old folks homes, prisons, etc) the number of people who die from taking their drugs is much, much higher than those who die from not.

And many of the people who don’t take the drugs are probably experiencing side effects that they don’t want to confront their doctors with, probably because they are worried their doctors will chastise them. And, in many cases doctors will dismiss the side effects as unrelated to the new symptoms. At least until the drug is pulled off the market for causing too many side effects or deaths, as happens quite often.