Making medicines safer for all of us
Adverse drug events are now the fourth leading cause of death in hospitals.
It’s a reasonable bet they are an even greater cause of death in non-hospital settings where there is no one to monitor things going wrong and no one to intervene to save a life. In mental health, for instance, drug-induced problems are the leading cause of death — and these deaths happen in community rather than hospital settings.
There is also another drug crisis — we are failing to discover new drugs. [Read more…]
From the blog…
AI versus the Deep State
A distinguished colleague (C1) introduced last year’s word of the year – AI Slop – into last week’s The Prozac Liberation Front post. As an unaccountable editor, I took the liberty to suggest that many of us seemed to figure – or would pretty soon get round to figuring – that AI was all too…
The Prozac Liberation Front
Chatting, recently, to two different friends of his separately, mentioning the possible role of SSRIs or other meds in the Tumbler Ridge shooting, a colleague (C1 – the first of 3 colleagues in this post) got blown away by both of them. Conspiracy theories, they told him. Misinformation – you’re being ridiculous. One of them…
Can We Avoid Being Eaten
Carney at Davos Like or loathe his politics, unless I am missing something, Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minister and Liberal party leader, seems a decent man. As the Canadian standing up to Donald Trump, whether you are pro- or anti-Trump, you are likely interested to see how this contact sport plays out. (Even Curling is…
Gaslighting, Milgram and Madness
This image is from Wikipedia Gaslighting which gives the credit details. The word Gaslighting comes from the 1944 movie Gaslight about a husband’s attempts to get his wife to doubt her sanity. It caught on slowly but as this graph shows in the last decade its use has taken off. The greatest relative rise in…
Gaslighting in Healthcare
This post features Letters from Peter Scott-Gordon to Lade Smith – the originals are in the link. Readers outside Britain should assume that the gaslighting here applies to regulators and medical bodies in their country also and should not be fooled by this apparently polite correspondence. 4 February 2026 Dear Dr Lade Smith, PATIENT SAFETY I…