It is very upsetting to me/Me too!//Me Three!//Me Four, Fix and Sixx.

[Sir Arthur C.B.E. Wholeflaffers A.S.A.]

It is very upsetting to me/Me too!

Percentage increase in prescription drug prices 1980-1990: 152
Percentage increase in general inflation rate, 1980-1990: 58
Profits as a percentage of sales, all industries, 1990 4.6%
Top Ten pharmaceuticals: 15.5%
Amount spent on drug research and development by the pharmaceutical
industry in 1991: $9 billion Amount Spent on sales and marketing:
$10 billion
Harvard Medical School researchers counted 7,000 deaths from poor
hospital care in New York State in one year alone.
Of 185 consecutive heart-attack victims who had been brought by
ambulance to a Rhode Island hospital, every single one of them died.
Number of Americans who cannot afford to buy enough food to maintain
good health: 30 million
Rank of United States among twenty-four industrialized countries in
frequency of low birthweight babies: Number 1
Proportion of children in the United States who are fully vaccinated:
67 percent
Four big corporations account for seven out of ten for-profit
psychiatric beds in the United States
More deaths are caused by surgery each year than in the wars in
Korea and Vietnam
American doctors perform six times as many cardiac bypass operations
per capita as English doctors do, although the life-expectancy rates
are
equivalent
An American woman has two to three times the chance of having a
hysterectomy as her counterpart in Europe; 60 percent of the
hysterectomies
performed in America on are done on women under the age of forty-
four.
A firm that evaluates medical care for insurance-industry clients
calls
27 percent of hysterectomies unnecessary, the highest percentage of
all
procedures it evaluates
American doctors do more prostate surgery per capita than do doctors
anywhere in Europe
The United States leads the industrialized world in the rate of
cesarean-section
operations--50 to 200 percent higher than in most other countries.
American doctors use far more X-rays per patient than do doctors in
other
countries
In the book “Worst Pills, Best Pills,” edited by Dr. Sidney Wolfe and
Rose-Ellen Hope, found “mounting evidence [shows] that many of our
older citizens are getting prescription drugs which are entirely
unnecessary (the wrong diagnosis has been made or nondrug therapy
would work),
they are getting a more dangerous drug when a much less dangerous one
would
work...or a lower dose of the same drug would give the same befits
with lower
risks.”