Azithromycin Scare

I kind of like ABC news, since they at least reported the news about azithromycin and a lot of other folks didn’t.

For more information, here is the original article, and here is the FDA safety announcement (this link leads to a PDF which will load in a separate window, but you must have the Adobe Acrobat reader – free – installed).

Pfizer – the maker – gave a predictable statement about how much this medication had been used all over the world, and how this only affected a small portion of the people who use it.

Me, I am sitting here in my home, hot bothered and angry, something I get a lot more lately.

First, this has nothing to do with the fact, appropriately reported in the U.K., that the head of the World Health Organization has said antibiotics are developing resistances so quickly that soon it will be possible to die from a knee scrape.

This is an issue in drug monitoring general safety.  Pfizer says it has always done this on its own products.  I am glad ABC news asked them for a statement, but if you believe they take responsibility for their own drugs, I am sure I can find you someone with that ocean-front property in Arizona you have been looking for .

The New England Journal of Medicine study was funded by funding groups within our government that, as far as I can figure, had nothing to do with Pfizer.  That is not surprising, either.

The FDA warning is a good idea.

The ABC news article appropriately quotes the FDA as saying anyone on this drug should consult a physician if they have what should be functional cardiac signs.

I am unaware of anyone telling doctors anything.

I am aware of rolling my eyes heavenward on multiple occasions when people tell me about the few minutes they have with their doctors.

First, will any healthcare system call in all the patients on this drug?

Do they need an electrocardiogram, or just a doctor to listen to heartbeat, or both?

Do they need either or both of these things before they go on the drug?

Does the doctor have any time, before tipping over from exhaustion from seeing too many patients (to pay the rent or something equally banal) to do either or both of the above?

Okay, so even the people doing the study said statistically that the amount of folks they found were suffering from this problem (also known as “dead people) was small.  It was, however, a very REAL finding, since they quote “confidence interval.”  Trust me on this one.  You don’t want a bio-statistics course here.  Somebody died, and this was the cause.

I love patients.

I love the people who come to me and tell me about their permanent pain or chronic infections or whatever.

I can give them a little peace in their symptoms with prescription drugs or a marijuana permission. I can give them the knowledge someone cares, someone that they can call.  I can even tell them what kind of resources they might need, a little about how to find them.

There would not be a constant demand for more antibiotics in the first place if doctors used them correctly.  Social responsibility in the drug companies?  Not when they are making this much money.

I can see us doing something in the near future that is analogous to marijuana.  Going back maybe to the ancient disinfectants, like silver salts.

Not that I recommend Pfizer’s medicine or any other brand.  I do see a renaissance in research in this sort of thing coming, as antibiotics increase in uselessness.

Here we have a drug and it matters little if it is an antibiotic or anything else, but it sometimes kills people in the small group studied in Tennessee.  We cannot be really sure how many folks it has killed.

Not everyone can pick up the ABC news findings, or trace them, or question them.

Doctors now alive and practicing cannot possibly have been seriously trained in antibiotic alternatives.

I am fighting tears as I write this, another frequent situation – and I am not having a depression.

What about all of my prayers and oaths about the sanctity of human life?  What does it take to make a tragedy?

Before it was known what Stalin was up to, he got a remark through to Harry S.Truman at Potsdam that made the latter wonder what was going on.

“If one man dies, it is a tragedy.  If many die, it is a statistic.”

I decided a long time ago that Darwinian evolution was doing nothing to improve man’s superego; no improvement of morals nor beliefs, let alone the quality of action.

I want the United States to take back the sanctity of human life that the founding fathers believed in.

We need to stem the tide.  Only by forcing guidelines for doctors and their “extenders” can we start to preserve life.

Nobody has yet been able to convince me why considerations of cost or profit should supersede even a single human life.

Everyone has the right to live as long as they can and as healthy as they can.

Http://naturalpac.com

I’m working on this with some very special people. If you want to join me, check out my Political Action website occasionally.

 

Copyright 2013 Estelle Toby Goldstein, MD