Hospital patients given unnecessary acid-suppressants
I don't have flood insurance for my top-floor apartment in the middle of a city.
Shocking, I know.
Joking aside, though, why would you have insurance for something that isn't going to happen?
Likewise, can you really "prevent" something that wasn't going to happen in the first place?
Most hospitals must think so.
After all, they routinely give 40 to 70 percent of all inpatients (yeah, that's a wide range, but it comes from several different studies and even at the low end is a LOT of people) acid-suppressive medication to prevent gastrointestinal bleeding. Even though, as it turns out, there's really not much of a reason to give the drugs.
And a whole bunch of reasons not to.
When "prevention" gets dangerous
A new study reported in the online version of The Archives of Internal Medicine shows that GI bleeding among hospital inpatients is rare whether or not a preventative drug is given.
Just how rare? We're talking 0.29 percent of non-ICU patients. Yes, less than 1 percent of all of the people coming into the hospital end up with GI bleeding, but hospitals are giving "preventative" drugs to 40 to 70 percent.
To prevent just one instance of GI bleeding, 770 patients would need to be treated with the drugs. You could say they're overdoing it just a bit.
Not only that, but acid suppressive drugs have been linked to some pretty serious complications, including pneumonia and Clostridium difficile infections (which can cause serious intestinal conditions).
It's a practice that developed in intensive care. Doctors started giving ICU patients acid suppressive drugs because such patients are more prone to erosion of the gastric lining to the point of bleeding.
Over time, though, hospitals started going with the "hey, this works for a few people, why not do it for everybody!" method of decision-making. And that's when they started putting non-ICU patients at high risk for infection on the drugs... without any evidence that the drugs were doing any good at all.
The concept that what works for one person or a particular group of people isn't going to work for everyone (and could in fact be downright dangerous) just seems so obvious to me. So why do I feel like the mainstream just doesn't get it?
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Christine O'Brien writes the e-letter Health eTips for Dr. Wright's Nutrition and Healing.
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Comments
Stephanie 266
I found this out when I was hospitalized for diabetes. They tried to give it to me, but I wouldn't take it for the above reasons. After I came home, I calculated and realized that at the price they charge for giving pills, multiplied by the patients and hospitals in this area, they were making at least $4 million a year off of one unnecessary pill! Shocking!
Lori
These drugs also prevent absorption of nutrients, like caclium, which can lead to osteoporosis. Nobody needs them. More often than not, "acid" symptoms are a result of low stomach acid. It was GlaxoSmithCline that coined "GERD". It's not really a disease, but it sure is a money maker.
Lori
Add magnesium deficiency to the list here. There's a new article on medpage (March 2nd) that says the use of proton pump inhibitors, or acid supressing meds, for a year or longer leads to low levels of circulating magnesium. The FDA warned this could lead to "leg spasms, arrhythmias, and seizures". And apparently in about 25% of the cases examined, magnesium supplementation didn't help. The drugs they looked at also included OTC drugs like Prilosec and Prevacid. Most Americans are deficient in magnesium already. This just adds insult to injury...
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