The Facts About Supplement Safety

Educate yourself about supplement vs. medication safety armed with facts and not propaganda:

 Dr. Adria Rothfeld-Magenheim, DC, MS, CNS

Recent headlines have once again attempted to discredit the use of supplements, with conclusions based upon very selectively chosen snippets of data, leading to significant misrepresentation. In an effort to illustrate how convoluted the path from the research to the headlines actually is, I will explore the statements with arguments that are well-validated.  

Drug vs. Supplement Safety:

Drugs are known to cause well over 125,000 deaths per year when taken correctly as prescribed – yet the FDA allows “fast-track” approvals and countless new additions to the marketplace.

The Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) in the United States says that at least 1 death occurs per day and 1.3 million people are injured each year due to medication errors.

Medication errors occur in nearly 1 out of every 5 doses given to patients in the typical hospital.

Patients who suffered unintended drug events remained in the hospital an average of 8 to 12 days longer. These hospital stays cost an additional $16,000 to $24,000.

A recent review of 48 studies in the United Kingdom revealed that adverse drug reactions to newly marketed drugs are 60% more common in women than in men.

On average, women have a lower body weight, smaller organ size, reduced blood flow and a higher proportion of fat compared with men. Overall differences in hormonal activity between the sexes affect the way drugs are processed.

So why are dietary supplements on the chopping block? Maybe it is somehow connected to this statement: The study is the first to document the extent of severe injuries and hospitalizations tied to dietary supplements, a rapidly growing $32 billion a year industry that has attracted increased scrutiny in the past year….

The following is data that should help to clarify the real issues:

• As noted by Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, Americans easily take more than 60 billion doses of nutritional supplements every year:”Well over half of the U.S. population takes daily nutritional supplements. Even if each of those people took only one single tablet daily, that makes 165,000,000 individual doses per day, for a total of over 60 billion doses annually. Since many persons take far more than just one single vitamin or mineral tablet, actual consumption is considerably higher, and the safety of nutritional supplements is all the more remarkable.Over 60 billion doses of vitamin and mineral supplements per year in the USA, and these are the stats: . “In 2010, not one single person [in the US] died as a result of taking vitamins (Bronstein, et al, (2011) Clinical Toxic).”
• “In 2004, the deaths of 3 people [in the US] were attributed to the intake of vitamins. Of these, 2 persons were said to have died as a result of megadoses of vitamins D and E, and one person as a result of an overdose of iron and fluoride. Data from: ‘Toxic Exposure Surveillance System 2004, Annual Report, Am. Assoc. of Poison Control Centers.’”

• Even if these figures are taken as correct, and even if they include intentional and accidental misuse, the number of alleged vitamin fatalities is strikingly low, averaging less than one death per year for over two and a half decades. In 19 of those 27 years, AAPCC reports that there was not one single death due to vitamins.

Still, the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service Editorial Board was curious: Did eleven people really die from vitamins? And if so, how?

(OMNS, June 14, 2011) Over a twenty-seven year period, vitamin supplements have been alleged to have caused the deaths of a total of eleven people in the United States.

The American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC) attributes annual deaths to vitamins as:

Here we go again: A large new study by the federal government found that injuries caused by dietary supplements lead to more than 20,000 emergency room visits a year.

Let’s look closely at the statistics upon which this study is based:

• 21% of these were based upon unsupervised children who had accidentally ingested supplements.
• Among adults 65 and older, choking caused 37.6% of all ER visits for supplement-related adverse events.
• Weight loss and energy enhancing products caused 71.8% of supplement related adverse events involving palpitations, chest pain or tachycardia and most of these adverse effects were in persons 20-34 years of age.

The following data has been published in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association.

JAMA. 1998 Apr 15;279(15):1200-5. Incidence of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients: a meta-analysis of prospective studies. Lazarou J, Pomeranz BH, Corey PN

OBJECTIVE: To estimate the incidence of serious and fatal adverse drug reactions (ADR) in hospital patients.

The authors, led by Jason Lazarou, culled 39 previous studies on patients in hospitals. These patients, who received drugs in hospitals, or were admitted to hospitals because they were suffering from the drugs doctors had given them, met the following fate:

Every year, in the US, between 76,000 and 137,000 hospitalized patients die as a direct result of the drugs.

Beyond that, every year 2.2 MILLION hospitalized patients experience serious adverse reactions to the drugs.

The authors write: “…Our study on ADRs [Adverse Drug Reactions], which excludes medication errors, had a different objective: to show that there are a large number of ADRs even when the drugs are properly prescribed and administered.”

So this study had nothing to do with doctor errors, nurse errors, or improper combining of drugs. And it only counted people killed who were admitted to hospitals. It didn’t begin to tally all the people taking pharmaceuticals outside hospitals who died as consequence of the drugs.

DATA SYNTHESIS: The overall incidence of serious ADRs was 6.7% and of fatal ADRs was 0.32% of hospitalized patients. We estimated that in 1994 overall 2,216,000 hospitalized patients had serious ADRs and 106,000 had fatal ADRs, making these reactions between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death.

I hear repeatedly that supplements are unsafe since they are not “FDA regulated.” To respond, our supplements meet FDA guidelines and are pharmaceutical grade, but unlike medications which rely on the understaffed overworked FDA to oversee them, our GMP/NSF supplements are 3rd party tested by independent labs, ensuring that they meet label claims.

So how protected are we by the FDA? A lot less than you are led to believe:

Below is a list of approved drugs and how long they were on the market from the time the industry was warned of their serious danger until being withdrawn:

• Table 2. Twenty Drugs Approved After 1992 and Later Withdrawn From the Market for Safety Reasons:

Comparing deaths from medical drugs, vitamins, all US wars

Jon Rappoport cited the review, “Is US Health Really the Best in the World?”, by Dr. Barbara Starfied (Journal of the American Medical Association, July 26, 2000).

Here are two key quotes he cites from her article:

“The FDA and its “quack-buster” allies go after vitamins, demean “unproven remedies,” and generally take every possible opportunity to warn people about “alternatives,” on the basis that they aren’t scientifically supported.

Meanwhile, the very drugs these mobsters are promoting—and in the case of the FDA, CERTIFYING AS SAFE AND EFFECTIVE—are killing and maiming people at a staggering rate.”

The masses are treated to non-stop PR on the glories of the US medical system.

In the Wikipedia entry, “US military casualties of war,” the grand total of all military deaths in the history of this country, starting with the Revolutionary War, is 1,312,612.

In any given 10 years of modern medical treatment? 2,250,000 deaths.

Consider how much suppression is necessary to keep the latter number under wraps.

http://prescriptiondrugs.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=005528

Here are some that may sound familiar, perhaps you’ve even taken them yourself?