The original poster was wrong...200,000 americans do not die every year from prescription drugs. Its 783,000 americans. http://www.naturalnews.com/009278.html
I saw a post in P&R about how bad "praying" is and how over 20 years 170 people died(less than 9 per year) because they could've been given "life saving" drugs. Stuff like that gets so much media attention, but you never hear about the nearly million people per year that die from "life saving" drugs. In fact...prescription drugs have been so ingrained in our minds that despite the fact that so many die from it, most of the people reading this will still take any drug the doctor gives them without a second thought.
The report is put out by naturalist doctors who are seeking to disprove conventional medicine. (their premise is that FDA is interfering with alteranatives to medications.. i don't think FDA would have a problem with these alternatives if they were proved to work better than conventional medications in a controlled trial.. but these hacks of course could never prove that they were effective.. otherwise they pharm companies would already have commercialized it) As part of the 783k figure, they include deaths caused by: Condition Deaths Cost Author Adverse Drug Reactions 106,000 $12 billion Lazarou(1), Suh (49) Medical error 98,000 $2 billion IOM(6) Bedsores 115,000 $55 billion Xakellis(7), Barczak (8) Infection 88,000 $5 billion Weinstein(9), MMWR (10) Malnutrition 108,800 ----------- Nurses Coalition(11) Outpatients 199,000 $77 billion Starfield(12), Weingart(112) Unnecessary Procedures 37,136 $122 billion HCUP(3,13) Surgery-Related 32,000 $9 billion AHRQ(85) Total 783,936 $282 billion From the source data, you can see that this figure is a complete pseudoscience figure published so that media can quote something that sounds impressive. bedsores? how is that related to medicine? infection? hardly something caused by western medicine outpatients? not sure what that means.. people die at home?