The death of several hospital patients in Calgary from Potassium Chloride is only the snowflake on the tip of the iceberg. It is estimated that over 100,000 Americans a year die due to properly prescribed pharmaceuticals in hospitals and well over 100,000 die from improperly prescribed drugs, surgical mistakes and other errors. In Canadian terms this is well over 20,000 Canadians a year (although, amazingly enough, routine statistics are not kept). This makes our medical system the third leading cause of death, perhaps even the first or second.
The best solution is not to improve our medical system but to use less of it. The fewer people who have checkups, resulting in tests for conditions with no clinical symptoms, resulting in the prescription of drugs that later cause serious disease, the better. While hospitals save many lives, even there, many people are only in hospitals because they got on the medical treadmill in the first place.
Ironically, if Canadians only used medical services when they were ill, the cost of our medical system would drop dramatically, something that no political party seems to have recognized as a solution to our medical funding crisis. We need more focus on diet, exercise and a cleaner environment. We need health more than we need medicine!
Copyright © David Crowe,