Here is a word that most of us have not heard or used: “IATROGENESIS”: The definition: Iatrogenesis is the causation of a disease, a harmful complication, or other ill effect by any medical activity, including diagnosis, intervention, error, or negligence
We have all heard the almost joking recommendation to stay away from being admitted to hospitals because you can “be killed there”. This is no joke. There are 250,000 Americans that die each year from iatrogenic causes. In the hospital setting, hospital-acquired infections (many of these are with very resistant organisms) are the most common iatrogenic issues. Of course, we hear about the sensationalistic cases of people receiving the wrong blood in transfusions, surgeons mistakenly cutting arteries and other blatant errors made that hurt/kill people.
This entry was inspired by a recent FDA warning that was issued regarding the new class of injectable weight loss medications: Ozempic and the other GLP medications. The warning was issued because there have been many cases of overdosing of these medications due to an error in patients’ self-injections. Rather than taking the prescribed dosage, by mistake in drawing up too much in the syringe, people are sometimes taking 10X or more of what they should be injecting. This scenario is occurring much more with compounded versions of the semaglutide as often the medication is in a bottle and patients need to draw a certain amount into a syringe before self-injecting. The name brand ones often provide prefilled syringes so errors like this cannot occur.
Whether it be errors made by nurses/doctors in a hospital, a hospital-acquired infection, a mistake made in drawing up a medication in a syringe or other, we all must be very careful about having more harm to us done by the evaluation/treatment of a problem than the problem itself.
Clearly, no songs about iatrogenesis, but here is one from New Jersey’s own, DOCTOR Hook….what a throwback!
