Saturday, August 2, 2008

Risking Our Own Hea(l)th

Outside of emergency rooms, patients are still making fatal mistakes, now with drugs and alcohol.

The University of California, San Diego, has announced a 3,196 percent increase in "fatal domestic medication errors" (that's a comma, not a decimal point) occuring at home. Granted, these errors were involving "alcohol and/or street drugs," but the authors are linking the trend with our societal shift towards taking medication outside of a medical setting.

To recap from the two stories, we don't understand what our doctors tell us as we leave the emergency room, but then we end up taking more medication at home anyway, with increasingly fatal consequences.

What's really classy about the UCSD news release, though, is how it has sandwiched Heath Ledger references into its opening and closing paragraph.

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The header image is adapted from a photo taken by Bill McChesney and used under a creative commons license.
 
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