Mortality of medications

I get asked about the mortality of surgery quite often, but will your diabetes doc tell you the mortality rate of their treatment?

Turns out some meds increase the death rate

excess DEATHS with popular Diabetes meds



Here are some selected quotes from the link----

"431 excess deaths for every 100,000 patients who receive rosiglitazone rather than pioglitazone"

"Given that there are about 3.8 million prescriptions for rosiglitazone dispensed annually in the United States, "the effect on public health may be considerable," they warn."

In an accompanying editorial, Victor Montori and Nilay Shah from the Mayo Clinic in the US argue that the rosiglitazone story "says much about how healthcare has become less about promoting patients' interests, alleviating illness, promoting function and independence, and curing disease, and much more about promoting other interests, including those of the drug industry."

Somebody correct my math - that gives 16,378 deaths from this med....


NOW - if we do the math for DEATH from gastric bypass, that is 0.003, or 3 per thousand. if 3.8 million diabetics all had surgery, the mortality would be 11,400 - BUT the diabetes resolution rate is almost 90%! So at the end of a year (using a conservative 80%) then over 3 million people would be off ALL diabetic meds.

Ouch.

Of course, to get that done, a thousand surgeons would have to operate on almost 400 diabetic patients a year, every year for a decade - which is about double the current rate of bariatric surgery for obesity.