The NHS kills off 130,000 elderly patients every year

"That's socialised medicine for you!"
(Or something similar, I imagine. )
 
As the doctor pointed out, in this case the extra 14 months of life came at considerable cost to the taxpayer (or, in a private enterprise driven system what would have been a considerable cost to the patient, the family or to the payers of insurance - or, most likely all three). It is always a difficult balance to find decide how much of the finite resources should be used to extend the life of a retired person in poor shape and how much should be invested in a young person in acute distress but with potentially decades of productive life ahead. 130,000 sounds pretty terrible and maybe it is, but in the US 100,000 people die every year from complications with prescription drugs. They'd be better off smoking pot which kills far less people.
 
Read the article, the headline is completely wrong.
...but this is the Daily Mail, so it's perfectly normal for them.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
130,000 sounds pretty terrible and maybe it is, but in the US 100,000 people die every year from complications with prescription drugs. They'd be better off smoking pot which kills far less people.
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About 50% of the US population (studies vary from 47-55%) are on prescription drugs at any one time. That's 156Million. 100K sounds like a lot but that's about .05% of all people taking drugs. Which means the drug doesn't kill 99.95% of people.

Now if we could somehow find those .05% and tell them to smoke pot and not take drugs that'd be wonderful. The problem is we can't. We never know. If we told all people to just smoke pot to protect the .05% a lot more than .05% would die simply from the wrong treatment. As in pot doesn't heal every condition. In the end I think we'd see the deathrate skyrocket from .05%.
 
faethor said:
As in pot doesn't heal every condition.
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Other than pain relief and boredom, I'm not aware of it actually healing anything.
Happy to be corrected though.
 
@Robert,
Yeah I softballed the healing point. I think the data is weak on what pot is indeed good for. And I encourage more research. Promoters of pot will tell you it heals or improves almost every negative human condition. MS gets better, diabetes is cured, Crohns patients shit right, and enables people of all creeds and religions to put down their guns and give each other back massages. It probably does something but IMO neither side helps in this question.
 
many prescription drug deaths do not make the final tally because doctors do not attribute, things like organ failure in the aged and infirm, to the cocktails of drugs many are given and as such "natural causes", aren't always natural.
 
There are some strange rules around reporting deaths. For example, if one has a major surgery and they die within 30 days they count that against the surgery. According to my Physican friend it doesn't matter the true cause. Have open heart, get hit by a bus, the open heart gets a tick of an early death.
 
Robert said:
Other than pain relief and boredom, I'm not aware of it actually healing anything.
Happy to be corrected though.
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It heals the bottom line of those companies that make drugs that fight lung cancer.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
As the doctor pointed out, in this case the extra 14 months of life came at considerable cost to the taxpayer (or, in a private enterprise driven system what would have been a considerable cost to the patient, the family or to the payers of insurance - or, most likely all three). It is always a difficult balance to find decide how much of the finite resources should be used to extend the life of a retired person in poor shape and how much should be invested in a young person in acute distress but with potentially decades of productive life ahead. 130,000 sounds pretty terrible and maybe it is, but in the US 100,000 people die every year from complications with prescription drugs.
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Probably save a ton of money if people stopped living past 30. Which is why I posted that scene from Logan's Run, ultimate government health care in motion.
 
Dammy said:
Probably save a ton of money if people stopped living past 30. Which is why I posted that scene from Logan's Run, ultimate government health care in motion.
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Remember retirement age was originally setup by industry. They set the age a couple of years beyond the typical lifespan of their employees.
 
Dammy said:
So increasing one's chances of lung cancer is a better way?
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The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.
The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.
"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729.html
 
Dammy said:
Probably save a ton of money if people stopped living past 30. Which is why I posted that scene from Logan's Run, ultimate government health care in motion.
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No, not really. Most people are productive well past 30 and decades of experience is valuable in itself. Killing everyone at thirty would be a huge cost to society rather than a benefit. Most 30 year olds are more than self supporting.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
No, not really. Most people are productive well past 30 and decades of experience is valuable in itself. Killing everyone at thirty would be a huge cost to society rather than a benefit. Most 30 year olds are more than self supporting.
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one's 30's and 40's are the prime of life. for some people at least that would be a stupid time to leave this 'Veil of Tears' (to use my father's expression)
 
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