Pradaxa: Legal Mass Murder! Posted by Mark Sircus - Director on 05 November 2012 | Filed under Medicine A Promising Drug With a Flaw was the name of an article published in the New York Times this past week. Dr. Bryan A. Cotton, a trauma surgeon in Houston, had not heard much about the new anticlotting drug Pradaxa other than the commercials he had seen during Sunday football games. Then people using Pradaxa started showing up in his emergency room. One man in his 70s fell at home and arrived at the hospital alert and talking. But he rapidly declined. “We pretty much threw the whole kitchen sink at him,” recalled Dr. Cotton, who works at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. “But he still bled to death on the table.” Unlike warfarin, an older drug, there is no antidote to reverse the blood-thinning effects of Pradaxa. “You feel helpless,” Dr. Cotton said. The drug has contributed to the bleeding deaths of at least eight patients at the hospital. “And that’s a very bad feeling for us.” Pradaxa has become a blockbuster drug in its two years on the market, bringing in more than $1 billion in sales for its maker, the privately held German drug maker Boehringer Ingelheim. Pradaxa has been linked to more than 500 deaths in the United States, demonstrating that in our current civilization it is fine to make a fortune killing people. Though a chorus of complaints has risen from doctors, victims’ families and others in the medical community, the FDA is not worried that its approval process was not sufficiently rigorous. “Pradaxa was identified as the primary suspect in 542 patient deaths reported to the FDA in 2011, and was linked to more reports of injury or death than any of the more than 800 drugs regularly monitored by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a nonprofit based in Pennsylvania that monitors medicine safety,” reported the Times. They are not at all concerned that they allowed a dangerous drug to be sold without an option for reversing its effects. They sleep at night, the whole lot of them over at the FDA, CDC and all the other health and medical organizations in the United States and Europe knowing that over 100,000 Americans die from their properly-prescribed medicines each and every year. The Food and Drug Administration released a report on Friday that found that the drug did not show a higher risk of bleeding than for patients taking warfarin. The report did not address the lack of an antidote for Pradaxa. What does the pharmaceutical company who makes the drug say? “In other words, the drug is still safe. But some reports have indicated that doctors are not sufficiently cautious when prescribing Pradaxa, giving the drug to older people or those with kidney problems even though there is evidence that the bleeding risks are higher in those groups. The company recommends testing patients’ kidney function before prescribing Pradaxa and notes that the risk of bleeding increases with age,” reports the Times.

Pradaxa: Legal Mass Murder!

Posted by Mark Sircus - Director on 05 November 2012 | Filed under Medicine

A Promising Drug With a Flaw was the name of an article published in the New York Times this past week.

Dr. Bryan A. Cotton, a trauma surgeon in Houston, had not heard much about the new anticlotting drug Pradaxa other than the commercials he had seen during Sunday football games. Then people using Pradaxa started showing up in his emergency room. One man in his 70s fell at home and arrived at the hospital alert and talking. But he rapidly declined. “We pretty much threw the whole kitchen sink at him,” recalled Dr. Cotton, who works at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. “But he still bled to death on the table.” Unlike warfarin, an older drug, there is no antidote to reverse the blood-thinning effects of Pradaxa. “You feel helpless,” Dr. Cotton said. The drug has contributed to the bleeding deaths of at least eight patients at the hospital. “And that’s a very bad feeling for us.” Pradaxa has become a blockbuster drug in its two years on the market, bringing in more than $1 billion in sales for its maker, the privately held German drug maker Boehringer Ingelheim.

Pradaxa has been linked to more than 500 deaths in the United States, demonstrating that in our current civilization it is fine to make a fortune killing people. Though a chorus of complaints has risen from doctors, victims’ families and others in the medical community, the FDA is not worried that its approval process was not sufficiently rigorous.
“Pradaxa was identified as the primary suspect in 542 patient deaths reported to the FDA in 2011, and was linked to more reports of injury or death than any of the more than 800 drugs regularly monitored by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a nonprofit based in Pennsylvania that monitors medicine safety,” reported the Times.

They are not at all concerned that they allowed a dangerous drug to be sold without an option for reversing its effects. They sleep at night, the whole lot of them over at the FDA, CDC and all the other health and medical organizations in the United States and Europe knowing that over 100,000 Americans die from their properly-prescribed medicines each and every year.

The Food and Drug Administration released a report on Friday that found that the drug did not show a higher risk of bleeding than for patients taking warfarin. The report did not address the lack of an antidote for Pradaxa.

What does the pharmaceutical company who makes the drug say? “In other words, the drug is still safe. But some reports have indicated that doctors are not sufficiently cautious when prescribing Pradaxa, giving the drug to older people or those with kidney problems even though there is evidence that the bleeding risks are higher in those groups. The company recommends testing patients’ kidney function before prescribing Pradaxa and notes that the risk of bleeding increases with age,” reports the Times.