In one of his last acts of 2016, President Obama signed into law the largest piece of healthcare legislation since the Affordable Care Act. The law – known as the 21st Century Cures Act – has the potential to invigorate medical research, promote innovation and speed the development and FDA approval of new treatments for cancer and other chronic diseases.

It also has the potential for increasing the risk of taking medications – including death. Not long ago, the risks were put into perspective in a controversial article.

The Journal of the American Medical Association published a landmark review by Dr. Barbara Starfield (Johns Hopkins School of Public Health), “Is US health really the best in the world?” In it, Starfield revealed what many people inside the medical establishment already knew: every year, like clockwork, the medical system was killing huge numbers of people.

Each year in the U.S., as Dr. Starfield reported, there are:

1) 12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgeries;
2) 7,000 deaths from medication errors in hospitals;
3) 20,000 deaths from other errors in hospitals;
4) 80,000 deaths from infections acquired in hospitals;
5) 106,000 deaths from FDA-approved correctly prescribed medicines.

The total of medically-caused deaths in the U.S. every year is 225,000. (a conservative estimate)

This makes the medical system the third leading cause of death in America, behind heart disease and cancer.

In the wake of Starfield’s devastating report, other facts came to light: 2.1 million people in America, every year, are hospitalized as a result of reactions to FDA-approved medicines. Annually, 36 million serious adverse reactions to those drugs occur.

Since the FDA approves every medical drug given to the American people, and certifies it as safe and effective, how can that agency remain calm about the fact that these medicines are causing 106,000 deaths per year? Dr. Starfield answered this question in an email interview.

“Even though there will always be adverse events that cannot be anticipated, the fact is that more and more unsafe drugs are being approved for use. Many people attribute that to the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is (for the past ten years or so) required to pay the FDA for reviews [of its new drugs]—which puts the FDA into an untenable position of working for the industry it is regulating. There is a large literature on this.”

Can you offer an opinion about how the FDA can be so mortally wrong about so many drugs? “Yes, it cannot divest itself from vested interests. (Again, [there is] a large literature about this, mostly unrecognized by the people because the industry-supported media give it no attention.)”

Perhaps the public and claims administrators should approach the use of newly expedited FDA approved medications with an abundance of caution.