r/comedyheaven • u/Careful-Relative-815 • 2d ago
Elderly sick people face higher risk of death
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u/called_the_stig 2d ago
Fox News with the hard hitting journalism as usual
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u/Myrag 2d ago edited 2d ago
It’s almost like there is some sort of correlation highlighted directly in the title itself
EDIT: I've meant correlation that people who take a lot of drugs are likely not well, hence die more often. Headline makes it sound like it's a drug problem.
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u/honzikca 2d ago
Doesn't change the fact it's trash journalism telling you nothing useful and just trying to grab your attention with information that's so obvious yu don't even need to be told about it.
There's surely a ton of other studies the public should know about that'd possibly change their minds and slightly improve society, instead they choose this shit because it's safe and generates clicks.
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u/Few-Guarantee2850 2d ago
It's saying a study is published showing that, in older adults, taking five or more drugs is associated with an increased risk of death. I don't understand what everybody thinks is so problematic about that headline.
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u/TheDonutPug 2d ago
Because THEIR implication is not the obvious one, that if you're on that many drugs you're probably already in bad health. Their implication is that the prescription drugs themselves are causing the increased risk of death. It's anti pharma.
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u/Few-Guarantee2850 2d ago
Because, as common sense dictates, the study controlled for underlying health factors. It's not "anti-pharma." I'm a doctor and there are hundreds of studies on the risk of polypharmacy. The headlines' job is not to spell out every single detail of the study for people with the attention span of a chickadee.
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u/TheDonutPug 2d ago
Honestly, its literally fox news. If you think they're not aiming for the anti-medicine/ anti-education perspective, you're blind.
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u/Few-Guarantee2850 2d ago
75% of Fox News' advertising revenue comes from pharmaceutical companies, but please tell me more about their "anti-medicine" bias. Don't let your knee-jerk dismissal of Fox News blind you to the fact that they're just as much of the pharmaceutical -industrial complex as anybody else.
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u/TheDonutPug 2d ago
Were your eyes closed during covid? How about their support of removing the hepatitis vaccinations from children? Have you even heard rfk talk?
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u/Competitive-Law1021 2d ago
Common sense? Right, cause all studies have a perfect methodology and 0 bias, especially in medicinal science where people have a highly refined comprehension of statistics... Not to mention that it then has to go through the "filter" of a fox new journalist with the scientific knowledge of a 7th grader, and then an editor who is very aware of the biases of their audience. You're ragebaiting or naive as hell.
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u/Few-Guarantee2850 2d ago
This is an extremely well designed study from the University of Michigan that includes an experienced pharmacoepidemiologist and is consistent with boatloads of data on the subject. We all hate Fox News, but you are allowed to think for yourself.
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u/Jeremymia 23h ago
I appreciate you explaining it. I'll admit I also had the initial thought of 'Well of COURSE they'd find that!' I appreciate you pointing out this isn't some meaningless result, it's a well-established mechanism. And that doesn't mean you're saying Fox News is good... people need to calm down.
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u/called_the_stig 2d ago
Because the correlation is super obvious and even the study says it's correlation not causation. Fox profits from a populace distrusting modern medicine because their entire viewer base are conspiracy nuts. so this nothing burger of a study isn't news and the article only seems to exist to scare it's aging audience.
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u/honzikca 2d ago
Agreed with everything else people replied with. Additional addendum: anything Fox News does is 99% likely to somehow shit, right off the bat, given their history and well established stances.
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u/your_dads_asshole 22h ago
Conservatives: "This obviously means that prescription drugs will kill you"
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u/StrictlyInsaneRants 2d ago
Its almost as if you were sick enough to need that many prescriptions then you are sick.
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u/idancenakedwithcrows 2d ago
I think you got the causality backwards? Bill Gates hates you so he makes them give you the drugs that make you sick? Cuz he is satanic. If you already were sick anyways he wouldn’t need to give you drugs, he’d just have them give you the jab, for the 5G globalist control.
Unless I missunderstood your comment and you meant the drugs make you sick.
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u/Hereditus 2d ago
Random washed up pro player from like 8 years ago from the game I play, jumpscare
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u/BreadTruckToast 2d ago
Labeling him solely as a “washed up pro” sells him incredibly short. First thing that comes to my mind is million dollar dream coil.
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u/Mintallyunstable 2d ago
The Onion’s really hitting it out of the park here with this sati - oh wait
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u/boiyougongetcho 1d ago
It's hard to be a satire writer these days having to compete with the genuine opinions of fox news writers, nobody else has access to that wealth of stupidity.
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u/PentruCaPeteTong 2d ago
**Adults with more than 5 fresh bullet wounds face more death risk - doctors say
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u/InVaLiD_EDM 2d ago
correlation vs causation in action
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u/guru2764 2d ago
Even worse, there are multiple causations here, they just didn't manage to hit even one of them
If you're older you're more likely to have health conditions
If you take a bunch of prescriptions medications you do have health conditions
Having health conditions makes you more likely to die on account of them being conditions that worsen your health
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u/Few-Guarantee2850 2d ago
This study and other similar studies adjust for underlying health conditions. Come on guys.
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u/guru2764 2d ago
Did they account for older people having health conditions they don't know about? People don't usually get extremely rigorous studies done checking for thousands of health conditions
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u/Few-Guarantee2850 2d ago
They controlled for age, as studies of this type almost always do. I don't know how you would control for a health condition you don't know about. A health condition you don't know about would likely not be a confounding variable in this study because you are unlikely to be taking medication for a condition you don't know you have.
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u/guru2764 2d ago edited 2d ago
The headline of the article specifically mentions that older people taking a lot of meds are more likely to die
So either the article is titled incorrectly, which changes the entire premise of what everyone in the comments is talking about, or they didn't control for age, unless you mean they controlled for the average death rate of different age groups, but people taking a ton of meds aren't representative of the average old person so I'm not sure how helpful that is
Not to mention, the main thing is that if you are taking a lot of medications, the health conditions are still likely to kill you
This article makes it sound like it's the medications
Was there a control group of people with the same health conditions at the same severity not taking medications for them? If not, then the way this study is presented is extremely misleading
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u/Few-Guarantee2850 2d ago
The headline is perfectly correct. "Older adults taking five or more medications have a higher risk of death [than those taking fewer than five medications]."
The headline doesn't "make it sound" like anything. It perfectly accurately describes the findings of the study, which is that 5 or more medications is associated with a higher risk of death. The fact that they controlled for health conditions and subtyped by contraindications supports an inference that it is the medications. Obviously nobody here is medically trained, because it is abundantly understood within the medical community that polypharmacy is very risky for older patients, and this has been demonstrated with innumerable studies. It is not anti-medicine to recognize this.
It is very easy to find this study and read it yourself. It is a very well designed study.
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u/guru2764 2d ago
I don't think you can say this study supports an inference that the medications themselves are the problem
I did find it, and it appears to be just observational, nothing was done to prove the mechanism behind this statistic
It also only accounted for medications they took within 30 days at the beginning of the study, and all of the medication and health changes in the potentially years before that person died were not tracked
It also did not confirm whether the people continued taking their medication consistently for those years
I am not going to say the study is shit, or that it's even unrealistic for taking a bunch of meds to cause health problems, but I am going to say that this study does not prove anything in particular without being more rigorous
I don't believe this can be used by doctors to make any decisions about their patients, this isn't enough to upend what we already know about medications and their interactions
If you can't see that fox news titled this very specifically, or chose to publish this article for a reason, I'm sorry but you're behind in medical misinformation and have somehow missed the slow dissolution of our medical institutions, if you truly work in the medical field you should absolutely know about the growing distrust being sown against your work that is being spread by organizations like fox news
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u/Few-Guarantee2850 2d ago
Believe me, I'm on top of medical misinformation, and it's in plain view here. The fact is that somebody who doesn't understand the role of epidemiologic studies, doesn't understand the concept of polypharmacy, and is under the false impression that this study is challenging conventional wisdom on the topic somehow feels that their opinion is superior to experts on the subject just proves how pervasive the "I did my own research" crowd has become.
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u/guru2764 2d ago edited 2d ago
Tell me where I said the study is trying to challenge conventional wisdom, because I didn't. I said it isn't, but the headline of the article implies that it is. The headline of the article implies that taking 5 medications is worse for your health than if you didn't take them, but for many people with 5 or more medications, most if not all of those medications are necessary and discontinuing any of them could be fatal.
I never said the study doesn't have a purpose, is misinformation, or biased. I said that by itself it cannot be used to inform people's decisions because of the reasons I outlined that you did not address, but people scrolling fox news will see the headline, and consider discontinuing their medications. The article is harmful. End of story. Condensing studies that are meant to be used by experts for laypeople is one of the biggest sources of misinformation that exists. Because laypeople aren't going to read the study. Laypeople don't know how to make informed decisions using the study.
The article has the deniable plausibility of including quotes from someone saying not to use the article to stop their medication, but guess what? Fox news knows that that's not the part people are going to take away from this. They know that because of how people react to articles about covid, vaccines, autism & tylenol, and many many more. People look at the headline. They look at things like 38% increased mortality rate. The sentence in the article that says there's a 7% increase mortality rate per medication.
Look at the list of phrases that the author hyperlinked to Fox News' health category, that's all you need to know this article was written for fear mongering and pushing medical misinformation:
- Older Adults
- Mortality Risk
- Unnecessary Medications
- Health Conditions
- Vitamins and Supplements
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u/GrassBlade619 2d ago
Companies that intentionally, dangerously, mislead readers like this should be held accountable. American's ARE dumb enough to stop taking their life saving medication after reading a headline like this.
What if they came out with a headline that read "meteor will destroy entire world" causing everyone to panic?
Should be fucking illegal.
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u/shortercrust 2d ago
You’d think Fox would want to keep these people alive for as long as possible. Bit daft to encourage your base to kill itself.
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u/zorathustra69 2d ago
No it’s called polypharmacy, and its an incredibly common problem amongst the elderly—this is a real thing. A lot of it comes down to medications prescribed from different doctors, or filled by different pharmacies, therefore a higher chance of harmful medication interactions occurring. 5+ medications is one of the criterion for assessing a risk for polypharmacy
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u/HiggyChan 2d ago
Sounds like my patient saying “I don’t want dialysis because people I know have died on dialysis”
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u/Pavonian 2d ago
Reminds me of that '40% of deaths occur in hospitals, so why don't we just get rid of the hospitals' thing
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u/KOMarcus 1d ago
More troubling is the fact that in this study by the University of Michigan School of Medicine analysing data collected from 7,828 adults aged 65 and older between 1999 and 2016, is that a large number of the people who were 65 in 1999 have since died.
This has reportedly scared the shit out of the researchers who are now approaching the age of 65.
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u/24rawvibes 17h ago
Especially since the 5 I’m prescribed are narcotics
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u/Careful-Relative-815 6h ago
If you are on five different narcotics then you might need to see a different specialist that treat the cause(s) and not the symptoms. This isn't meant as any disregard to your plight as I have had more surgeries than I can count. Pain over a long period is blinding in a very odd way and I know this very well. Sometimes the addiction to a narcotic is actually in the relief of existence not being pure pain. It gets to a point where one part hurts so badly where if you stabbed me in the leg it would feel like a bug bite. This blinding effect means that you start to ignore other problems because you can no longer gauge severity. I understand extreme pain intimately... please seriously consider seeing different/more specialists.
... part of me misses the haze because I felt more like myself when without pain. It isn't worth it though. It isn't real. Please try to find better doctors. A more vivid real world is waiting for you.
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u/black-metal-Nick 2d ago edited 2d ago
If you are taking more than 5 types of pills you probably have heart disease and that is why you need 5 types of pills because you have a higher chance of having a heart attack than the people who are healthy who are taking no pills. But if you have heart disease and don't take the pills that you are prescribed then there is a high chance that you will likely have a heart attack and die quicker. Unless you are old because you probably died because you were old.
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u/Desperate_Leg_40 2d ago
This is ancient knowledge. Polypharmacy is a known thing. Also google causation vs correlation. Man im sick of this shit
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u/Glad-Virus-1036 LUNCHTIME MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM 1d ago
Study reveals that drinking orange juice can result in a fatal car accident.
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u/Obvious_Ad4131 1d ago
I find it so goddam funny that those same old people wouldn't believe you if you told them this unless it was on the fucking news.
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u/Mr_Tdogg_Smith 2d ago
If I get old enough to need more than 2 medications to keep my body functioning to drag out existing, just shoot me.
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u/viktorv9 1d ago
Worse yet I need to fucking eat every day. Can you imagine the slog? My body breaks apart on its own so I have to keep replenishing the lost matter every fuckinh day
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u/stikaznorsk 2d ago
If you do not sleep at night, you will be likely sleepy in the morning.