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Before you take your Tami-flu...(or anything else)

My point really was that drugs are approved without all the studies being reported, and according to @partgypsy, there have been some positive developments on the reporting front. The problem with the Tami-flu wasn't just the adverse affects, it was that it wasn't necessarily effective in most cases.

"After five years, Roche and the EMA opened up (the FDA has not, and did not respond to requests, both from Cochrane and Newsweek, to explain why). What Cochrane uncovered was more than 70 Tamiflu trials and well over 100,000 pages of unpublished reports. Among them were many trials where the results were negative or inconclusive. With this more complete picture of the testing, Cochrane concluded the trials don’t prove that Tamiflu prevents hospitalizations, contagiousness or complications. The only thing it definitely does do, Cochrane said, is shorten the duration of symptoms, by about a day."

and....

"Many agencies, including the CDC, did not change their positions after the report."

That is one reason I don't have blind faith in the CDC.
 
I lost the plot. o_OLol
 
@whitewave lol. That often happens in interesting threads no worries.

I thought I would share what I know and I do see “perks” in the medical field. Doctors getting taken out to lunches and dinners by the reps. Trips being sponsored to Hawaii (as an example) for CE. Sponsored by the pharmaceutical companies. Call it what you will but these things happen. Many things have bias to some degree so consumer/patient beware. And most importantly find a smart physician you trust and hopefully that in combination with your due diligence will keep you healthy and safe.
 
diamondseeker2006 said:
I am not talking about people who refuse to vaccinate. I am talking about parents who wisely, in my opinion, out of caution, choose to spread out the vaccines so that fewer are given at one time, since studies have not been done on the multiple vaccines given in the current schedule. Few babies need Hep B at birth, for example. Your baby can't catch Hep B from mine because mine has zero possibility of having Hep B. There's no risk to my child or others for me to delay that shot.
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I understand. If they are delaying vaccinations, wouldn’t some crucial vaccinations be delayed too? Wouldn’t that be why the pediatrician would refuse to see the patient?

I am asking solely out of curiosity. The only stories I have heard have been stories where delayed vacc. patients have put other patients at risk.

No studies done? If most everyone is getting the current vaccine schedule and incidence of harm are being reported, isn’t that the largest study of all? Are they not recording these incidences and keeping records?
 
House Cat said:
I understand. If they are delaying vaccinations, wouldn’t some crucial vaccinations be delayed too? Wouldn’t that be why the pediatrician would refuse to see the patient?

I am asking solely out of curiosity. The only stories I have heard have been stories where delayed vacc. patients have put other patients at risk.

No studies done? If most everyone is getting the current vaccine schedule and incidence of harm are being reported, isn’t that the largest study of all? Are they not recording these incidences and keeping records?
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There are plenty of claims for severe cases to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation program provided by the Federal Government. But those claims represent a small percentage of potential injuries just because most people don't always connect adverse effects with a vaccine and neither do many doctors.

While there is no admission that vaccines cause autism, here are some examples where the claimants won their vaccine injury cases for their children with autism:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/post2468343_b_2468343.html

There's plenty of info out there on the HPV vaccine and injuries, and we know a girl personally whose life has been drastically altered by it. This is another example of a vaccine that I think was put on the market too fast without enough evidence of safety and benefit. Even if it were found to be effective, not all girls need that vaccine by age 13. There are girls who are not sexually active until much later, and therefore there is no harm to anyone to delay the vaccine. That is one vaccine we opted out of for our youngest mainly due to it being so new at the time and, because she was not sexually active and that is another example of it causing no danger to others for her to delay or omit.

I am not anti-vaccine. All my kids are fully immunized except for the youngest and that one vaccine. But when I compare my kids' vaccine schedules with the current ones, I find it a little scary. My daughter immunizes her little ones, but she doesn't allow them to give more than used to be given at one time. That may mean extra doctor visits, but caution seems to be a wise choice when there are a lot of unknowns about which children might have adverse effects.
 
The doctor who posted that Newsweek article just posted a research article today related to Tamiflu:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/22156085/

"CONCLUSIONS: These data suggest Tamiflu use could induce sudden deterioration leading to death especially within 12 hours of prescription. These findings are consistent with sudden deaths observed in a series of animal toxicity studies, several reported case series and the results of prospective cohort studies. From "the precautionary principle" the potential harm of Tamiflu should be taken into account and further detailed studies should be conducted."
 
diamondseeker2006 said:
I am not anti-vaccine. All my kids are fully immunized except for the youngest and that one vaccine. But when I compare my kids' vaccine schedules with the current ones, I find it a little scary. My daughter immunizes her little ones, but she doesn't allow them to give more than used to be given at one time. That may mean extra doctor visits, but caution seems to be a wise choice when there are a lot of unknowns about which children might have adverse effects.
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I'd agree with you DS. I'm scare about all them vaccines the Dr. is giving to our baby grandkids.
 
whitewave said:
No. Kickbacks are completely against the law and have been since the early 2000s-- not even Pens or trips either. It all ended right as DH was entering private practice. He has never seen one dime, one pen, nothing..... (as it should be)
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FYI, Some Doctors do break the law...:bigsmile:
 
My sons pediatrician actually told us not to let them give him Hep B in the hospital, they give it at the one month check up. They also do not give any vaccines if a child seems at all sick and are perfectly fine with spreading them out as long as they are up to date by school age. He has a mild (level 1) egg white allergy so if any vaccines use egg white he only gets one at a time. Things like this show how important it is to interview pediatricians before you choose one for your child, so you can be sure you have the same philosophies.
 
Asscherhalo_lover said:
My sons pediatrician actually told us not to let them give him Hep B in the hospital, they give it at the one month check up. They also do not give any vaccines if a child seems at all sick and are perfectly fine with spreading them out as long as they are up to date by school age. He has a mild (level 1) egg white allergy so if any vaccines use egg white he only gets one at a time. Things like this show how important it is to interview pediatricians before you choose one for your child, so you can be sure you have the same philosophies.
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I admire your doctor and this is the kind of doctor I would want! :appl:
 
Sorry if this is off the subject a wee bit but I used the doctor search to see if my husband's doctor was listed since he is always trying to give him a prescription. I didn't find him but I did find an optometrist who received $69,000 in revenue from a drug or device company :eek2:
 
Just checked all my docs. My dermatologist is listed at $101k!!!!! No wonder her ering looks to be about 5ct!
 
diamondseeker2006 said:
My point really was that drugs are approved without all the studies being reported, and according to @partgypsy, there have been some positive developments on the reporting front. The problem with the Tami-flu wasn't just the adverse affects, it was that it wasn't necessarily effective in most cases.

"After five years, Roche and the EMA opened up (the FDA has not, and did not respond to requests, both from Cochrane and Newsweek, to explain why). What Cochrane uncovered was more than 70 Tamiflu trials and well over 100,000 pages of unpublished reports. Among them were many trials where the results were negative or inconclusive. With this more complete picture of the testing, Cochrane concluded the trials don’t prove that Tamiflu prevents hospitalizations, contagiousness or complications. The only thing it definitely does do, Cochrane said, is shorten the duration of symptoms, by about a day."

and....

"Many agencies, including the CDC, did not change their positions after the report."

That is one reason I don't have blind faith in the CDC.
Click to expand...

Just wanted to point out that shortening the duration of the flu by a day or two is all Tamiflu is meant to do in the majority of cases in otherwise healthy patients (it stops replication of the virus). For most, it's not worth the copay, but for others, it can save their lives (as was discussed previously).

When a patient is upset that they cannot pay for it, I reassure them that Tamiflu DOES NOT cure the flu... it only shortens the duration by a day or so. Also, it's time sensitive, so if you've been feeling ill for more than 2 days, I'd say skip it.
 
diamondseeker2006 said:
The doctor who posted that Newsweek article just posted a research article today related to Tamiflu:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/22156085/

"CONCLUSIONS: These data suggest Tamiflu use could induce sudden deterioration leading to death especially within 12 hours of prescription. These findings are consistent with sudden deaths observed in a series of animal toxicity studies, several reported case series and the results of prospective cohort studies. From "the precautionary principle" the potential harm of Tamiflu should be taken into account and further detailed studies should be conducted."
Click to expand...

Admittedly, I haven't read this study... but I can tell you that if 23,000 test subjects were in the study and one had any type of episode or reaction (even if it was not from the medication being studied), it must be listed as it "could" happen, regardless. We had a required 4th year pharmacy residency dedicated to picking these studies apart to see what they were REALLY saying. It taught that data doesn't mean a whole lot if you don't know how to interpret it. Percentages are misleading. It was a really tough residency, I'm not gonna lie, but it did open my eyes. It's amazing how many of these studies can be a bit misleading and/or distracting (although all the data is correct).

Do I remember how to apply this today? Heck no! ;-) I'm not saying that this isn't a valid study or anything like that... I just take all of what I learned into consideration when conversations like this come up.
 
Sooooo shouldn’t we be talking about misdiagnosed sepsis? One article referenced here about the 40 year old woman who died as having flu-related sepsis. I just saw another article (which I will try to find and reference here if I get time) about two children who recently died from being misdiagnosed as having the flu when in fact their demises were caused by sepsis which mimics flu symptoms.
 
monarch64 said:
Sooooo shouldn’t we be talking about misdiagnosed sepsis? One article referenced here about the 40 year old woman who died as having flu-related sepsis. I just saw another article (which I will try to find and reference here if I get time) about two children who recently died from being misdiagnosed as having the flu when in fact their demises were caused by sepsis which mimics flu symptoms.
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How about we expand it to medical misdiagnoses in general? Killing hundreds of thousands each year in the USA..."between 210,000 and 440,000 each year who go to the hospital for care suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death."

https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/05/03/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death/
"Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the U.S. Their figure, published May 3 in The BMJ, surpasses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's third leading cause of death—respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year."


https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/05/03/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death/

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/03/health/medical-error-a-leading-cause-of-death/index.html

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinio...s-are-being-treated-for-the-wrong-conditions/

snip...
WE read and hear a lot of headlines about health-care reform and related costs and hurdles. What we hear a lot less of, though, is misdiagnosis and why correcting the situation should be made a priority.

Despite our “latest and greatest” technologies, 15 percent of all medical cases in developed countries are misdiagnosed, according to The American Journal of Medicine. Literally millions of patients worldwide are being treated for the wrong conditions every year. The Mayo Clinic Proceedings found that 26 percent of cases were misdiagnosed while, according to The Journal of Clinical Oncology, up to a startling 44 percent of some types of cancer are misdiagnosed.

First, our health-care system is greatly fragmented. When there are so many opportunities to delay or misread tests, miscommunicate findings or order the wrong tests in the first place, the odds of getting the right diagnosis and right treatment too often are stacked against the patient.


A second root cause, according to Dr. Eta S. Berner and Dr. Mark L. Graber’s compelling article “Diagnostic Error: Is Overconfidence the Problem?”, may well be a physician’s overconfidence in his or her diagnostic ability. Once doctors have made up their mind about a patient’s condition, and once a diagnosis has been reached and the patient is sent down a treatment path, it’s very, very hard to step off that path.

This leads to the third root cause of misdiagnosis, which stems from the way doctors are trained to think. Dr. Jerome Groopman, one of the world’s foremost thinkers on diagnostic error, believes today’s “rigid reliance on evidence-based medicine” (reaching treatment decisions based on statistically proven data) is largely to blame for many diagnoses that are missed or off the mark.

The fourth root cause boils down to time, or lack thereof. Many time-strapped doctors today typically spend 10 to 15 minutes or less with each patient — not because they don’t care, but because there simply are not enough hours in the day to meet demand for in-depth, more detail-oriented care.


The fifth root cause of misdiagnosis is the still-growing number of subspecialty areas in which physicians practice. Whereas in earlier years doctors might specialize in one certain type of cancer, a growing number of them now choose to focus on the subset of a subcategory of a particular type of cancer. This is less than ideal if your initial treating doctor lacks in-depth training in the exact type of illness you have.
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I very rarely lurk on pricescope anymore, primarily because my life is consumed by being a busy doctormom of three. But this thread is horrifying, and among the reasons I wish I had never gone to medical school. With this sort of rhetoric, this is not a healthy place for me to spend my "free time."

Why is hating on doctors the new thing?? Why are doctors expected to be perfect?? There are bad people in EVERY field. We are HUMAN. 99.9% of us want the best for our patients are doing everything in our power to make it happen.

I suggest you watch this:

https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_goldman_doctors_make_mistakes_can_we_talk_about_that

As hard as you want to be on your physicians, I can promise we are 1000 times harder on ourselves. This trash is among the reasons that doctors are killing themselves at alarming rates.

Thanks to all who made my day a little brighter! :roll I will be sure to spend even less time here perusing.
 
icekid said:
I very rarely lurk on pricescope anymore, primarily because my life is consumed by being a busy doctormom of three. But this thread is horrifying, and among the reasons I wish I had never gone to medical school. With this sort of rhetoric, this is not a healthy place for me to spend my "free time."

Why is hating on doctors the new thing?? Why are doctors expected to be perfect?? There are bad people in EVERY field. We are HUMAN. 99.9% of us want the best for our patients are doing everything in our power to make it happen.

I suggest you watch this:

https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_goldman_doctors_make_mistakes_can_we_talk_about_that

As hard as you want to be on your physicians, I can promise we are 1000 times harder on ourselves. This trash is among the reasons that doctors are killing themselves at alarming rates.

Thanks to all who made my day a little brighter! :roll I will be sure to spend even less time here perusing.
Click to expand...

In general, doctors are bad and essential oils are good.
 
monarch64 said:
Sooooo shouldn’t we be talking about misdiagnosed sepsis? One article referenced here about the 40 year old woman who died as having flu-related sepsis. I just saw another article (which I will try to find and reference here if I get time) about two children who recently died from being misdiagnosed as having the flu when in fact their demises were caused by sepsis which mimics flu symptoms.
Click to expand...

I think the flu is causing the sepsis (dont quote me...not a doc).

I thought the flu process folks were dying from was flu->pneumonia -> sepsis but I dont know how long each "phase" was going on before they passed or
at what stage they were at when they made it to the hospital. I believe I read the 40 year old had been to the doc/hospital twice and they sent her home.
She was diagnosed with influenza the first time at the docs. The 3rd time she went in to the hospital they admitted her with pneumonia and she died from
sepsis the next morning :-(. Its all happening very fast.
 
Right, sepsis CAN follow the flu, but sepsis can also set in and mimic the flu and sometimes result in a misdiagnosed case. Not saying that was the deal with the 40 y/o woman but it’s possible. Her parents brought up a hand wound she’d recently sustained from a car accident.
 
monarch64 said:
Right, sepsis CAN follow the flu, but sepsis can also set in and mimic the flu and sometimes result in a misdiagnosed case. Not saying that was the deal with the 40 y/o woman but it’s possible. Her parents brought up a hand wound she’d recently sustained from a car accident.
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They did say that she was diagnosed with "influenza" which I'm assuming means that she was officially tested (thingy up the nose). Something else could have been going on at the same time though like the hand thing.
 
I think it goes flu--> pneumonia -----> sepsis
 
Well..that immunosuppressed kid of mine tested positive for the Type A flu yesterday. We have no real choice but to give him Tamiflu. He’s in a dangerous category of people to get the flu in the first place.

He had the quadrivalent flu vaccination.

He is going to miss at least the first day of grad school... He’s most upset about that. I’m biting my nails about his health (as always.)
 
@House Cat sorry to hear about your kid. My sister is still getting over it. She has leukemia which the meds mess up her immune response to anything, so she's having a very hard time of it. I have been free of it and hope it continues to be thus!

Was your son able to get pneumococcal vaccine? usually I separate them but didn't seem to have any issue this year. who knows why but glad for it. Any time I've ever had flu I end up with pneumonia so I try not to take too many chances.

Lotsa dust that all will be well!
 
My son had A about 2 weeks ago and then I got it a few days later. We all started tami flu. DH started it as soon as he started sneezing all day, so he only lost 1.5 days of work. My son still has a residual ear infection and I have residual bronchitis, so we both are still on antibiotics (I have asthma).
 
Sending good vibes @House Cat . It's funny when you say your "youngest kid", then mention grad school. I think they're "kids" forever. I hope your son gets better quickly. I'm still playing hermit and washing hands. Good thing I'm an introvert. Take care.
 
Arcadian said:
@House Cat sorry to hear about your kid. My sister is still getting over it. She has leukemia which the meds mess up her immune response to anything, so she's having a very hard time of it. I have been free of it and hope it continues to be thus!

Was your son able to get pneumococcal vaccine? usually I separate them but didn't seem to have any issue this year. who knows why but glad for it. Any time I've ever had flu I end up with pneumonia so I try not to take too many chances.

Lotsa dust that all will be well!
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Thank Arcadian. I’m sorry about your sister. I hope she will get better soon.

You reminded me of something crucial! He did have the pneumococcal vaccine this summer! That makes me feel more at ease. Thank you.:))
 
My friend's 13 year old daughter didn't get the flu shot this year, and now she has flu A, B and strep. If she doesn't improve tonight, they are admitting her to the hospital tomorrow morning.
 
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