Statistical analysis of a dataset obtained under FOI by Joel Smalley. In this article I present excess deaths for ICD-10 chapter V (F00 – F99): mental and behavioural disorders.
OMG. How do you die of voyeurism or transvestism? Are there any entries with those codings? What self-respecting doctor would put that on a death certificate?
LOL. One possibility is somebody being shot whilst peering through a keyhole. Death is rarely unicausal so the problem comes when trying to squeeze the information on a certificate into a single, conforming cause (conforming to WHO specifications, that is). But do remember that the ICD-10 coding frame is about case management of the living (and looking) just as much as it is about illness and death. I'd guess nobody died of voyeurism in the dataset but it does bring a cheeky smile to my face!
Changing the subject a little bit, I’ve heard Dr David Healy and Dr Peter Goetsche say that prescription drugs are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US. Is there any way of standing up that claim from these records for the UK? Which codes would you have to combine to get to a conclusion like that?
This can easily be done for the UK. There are codes in each chapter covering poisoning (5,603 codes), toxicity (4,467 codes) and drug-induced conditions (3,084 codes). If I had the time to work through these to isolate prescription drugs then we'd be able to plot a time series for prescription-related death since 2014.
I've added the project to my big list of projects. It will serve as a nice bookend to this series of articles in which the word iatrogenic has appeared no less than 9 times!
As I understand it the figure third most common is not poisoning etc but death attributal to use of medication in general, the majority of which is being correctly prescribed.
That's right. No pill is magic. Back in our unit folk would ask what their chances of surviving open heart surgery was and the lead surgeon would start out by saying, "well, the anaesthetic alone could kill you". Medicine is all about balancing risk.
Super interesting! After seeing part 3, I realized the the y-axis scales are changing from chart to chart, so I paid attention this time. 80+ have scales of 400, less than 50 have scales of less than 9. In addition, the same mysterious troughs are appearing in 70+, and I am guessing this is because for some reason these deaths are being shifted to the covid bucket leaving the troughs here.
The all age group chart here is dominated by the 70+ age groups.
Interestingly, my 93-year-old mother-in-law passed away from covid in January 2021 (she got covid before vaccines were available, got really sick, and died). But, IMHO, she didn't die because of covid, she died because of her dementia. How so? In the assisted care facility she lived in, they suddenly got an outbreak of covid, and in trying to contain the outbreak, they created an isolation wing. That is to say, if a resident got covid, the resident was moved from their room, to a room in the isolation wing. My mother-in-law didn't have covid, and she wanted to go in to the isolation wing where she normally walked each day. And she didn't understand why the door she used to go through everyday was taped shut and what all of the signs meant saying "DO NOT ENTER! Covid Isolation Unit!" so she just tore the signs down, removed the tape, strolled on in, and hugged all of her friends in the isolation ward that had covid. So, did she die because of covid, or did she die because she had dementia and unwittingly exposed herself to covid which then killed her? (BTW, we don't blame the facility for this, there was lots going on at the time, and they didn't realize that someone would ignore the signs and rip off the duct tape. Obviously they fixed this after what happened with my mother-in-law.)
I mention this here because it seemed relevant to the Mental Illness category.
My 97 year-old Mom on the other hand didn't get covid until after she was vaccinated. She has had it twice now, with no material symptoms (just a runny nose). Go figure.
My mother is 92 and in a care home since late 2021. I told her the reasons I wasn’t getting the vax but she chose to anyway. She’s had Covid since but the symptoms were mild. That generation is tough, having survived the privations of the War years and the Great Depression.
Keep your eye on that y-axis, for I always zoom in to get the juiciest story. Yep, the shift into the COVID bucket is what I'm reckoning.
That's a sad story indeed. My elderly parents managed runny noses for a few days and that was it, whilst their great friend (a health nut) didn't make it. A curious bug all round. A few things stick out and that is their insistence on home-cooked fresh food, a positive outlook, a mobile lifestyle and reluctance to take any kind of pill.
Those spikes (w/e April 10) are definitely nothing to do with DryJanuary but one might wonder about the spike March-April of UK Midazolam prescriptions, then again nothing to see here, move along, as explained by the ultra reliable FullFact: https://fullfact.org/health/midazolam-video-matt-hancock/
Only to those of a suspicious mind. The final two paragraphs of that FullFact check makes clear that:
<i>Morphine is also specifically used to treat the feeling of breathlessness in certain dying patients with Covid-19, so like midazolam, it wouldn’t be surprising for prescriptions to increase during a rise in fatal Covid-19 infections.
In response to claims that Full Fact checked last year, that elderly people were “culled” with midazolam, the Department of Health and Social Care told us: “These claims are deeply misleading. The government’s top priority throughout this pandemic has always been doing everything possible to save lives.”</i>
You may want to read the patient leaflet under the heading “Other medicines and Midazolam” starting - Concomitant use of Midazolam (there are a number of variations if you search Midazolam)
I don't trust any fact checking organisation these days. Both morphine and midazolam induce respiratory depression in high titration and the latter will also induce respiratory arrest. Morphine is contraindicated for asthma and decreased respiratory reserve. They are used as sedatives and to reduce anxiety and pain but if breathlessness arises from a deteriorating respiratory state then use of either of these drugs is dangerous. I am in contact with investigative teams and medics who have gathered detailed evidence of morphine and midazolam use on a case-by-case basis. I am not able to say more because of legalities.
This is truly shocking. I really can't think this can be anything other than older patients being put on end of life pathways to free up beds for the anticipated Covid avalanche. Or medically sanctioned genocide to call a spade a f*****g shovel. If we had any proper investigative journalists working for MSM organisations they would be all over this but I'm not holding my breath!
It sure is. These are emotionally-charged stats to be churning out right now, so I have a little weep, light a candle, scoff a biscuit and carry on in the hope proper investigation is sanctioned.
Totally with you on the fear factor, plus loneliness and loss of will to live. These would explain the broad spectrum and presumably would have a focused effect in time. My elderly parents were frightened shitless and were convinced a horrible death lay ahead, so I kept in regular contact and gave them military style 'decontamination orders' to keep them occupied. It worked a treat since they felt empowered, and in turn they helped their elderly neighbours.
My Mum and Dad both died in 2019. Of great old age.
My mother - a German War Bride who had survived the Allied carpet bombing of her city - was obsessed by the idea of a new pandemic, and even hoarded food. She was a genuine prepper.
She would have been utterly mortified to know that she missed it by 12 months.
The still-in-date food was donated to the local foodbank. A vanload of it. Mostly horrid stuff like Sauerkraut and Gherkins: I expect they stuck it in the nearest brown bin.
All of this is very disturbing JD, I was looking into this over recent days (not sure if what I’m seeing is accurate) but this came from link below. 26/01/23. am I reading this correctly from table 3a.
These are deaths in “English” hospitals - during March 2020 61.75% of all deaths where Covid was mentioned were in the groups with either “receiving treatment for mental issues” or “learning disability, and or autism”.
In April it dropped to 24.54%
If I am reading it correctly, then the deaths in (English Hospitals) where Covid was mentioned, represent 18.04% through to 26/01/2023
I think you mean table 4a. It's not obvious how they went about this for that list of conditions is far too small by a factor of at least 10! These are not figures I would use or trust.
OMG. How do you die of voyeurism or transvestism? Are there any entries with those codings? What self-respecting doctor would put that on a death certificate?
I know, right?
LOL. One possibility is somebody being shot whilst peering through a keyhole. Death is rarely unicausal so the problem comes when trying to squeeze the information on a certificate into a single, conforming cause (conforming to WHO specifications, that is). But do remember that the ICD-10 coding frame is about case management of the living (and looking) just as much as it is about illness and death. I'd guess nobody died of voyeurism in the dataset but it does bring a cheeky smile to my face!
Changing the subject a little bit, I’ve heard Dr David Healy and Dr Peter Goetsche say that prescription drugs are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US. Is there any way of standing up that claim from these records for the UK? Which codes would you have to combine to get to a conclusion like that?
This can easily be done for the UK. There are codes in each chapter covering poisoning (5,603 codes), toxicity (4,467 codes) and drug-induced conditions (3,084 codes). If I had the time to work through these to isolate prescription drugs then we'd be able to plot a time series for prescription-related death since 2014.
I guess you have a long enough to do list already.
I've added the project to my big list of projects. It will serve as a nice bookend to this series of articles in which the word iatrogenic has appeared no less than 9 times!
Iatrogenic - a word I had never heard before 2020.
As I understand it the figure third most common is not poisoning etc but death attributal to use of medication in general, the majority of which is being correctly prescribed.
That's right. No pill is magic. Back in our unit folk would ask what their chances of surviving open heart surgery was and the lead surgeon would start out by saying, "well, the anaesthetic alone could kill you". Medicine is all about balancing risk.
Here is the stat from Dr Healy. There must be more about it in his many books and papers.
https://davidhealy.org/about-data-based-medicine/
Super interesting! After seeing part 3, I realized the the y-axis scales are changing from chart to chart, so I paid attention this time. 80+ have scales of 400, less than 50 have scales of less than 9. In addition, the same mysterious troughs are appearing in 70+, and I am guessing this is because for some reason these deaths are being shifted to the covid bucket leaving the troughs here.
The all age group chart here is dominated by the 70+ age groups.
Interestingly, my 93-year-old mother-in-law passed away from covid in January 2021 (she got covid before vaccines were available, got really sick, and died). But, IMHO, she didn't die because of covid, she died because of her dementia. How so? In the assisted care facility she lived in, they suddenly got an outbreak of covid, and in trying to contain the outbreak, they created an isolation wing. That is to say, if a resident got covid, the resident was moved from their room, to a room in the isolation wing. My mother-in-law didn't have covid, and she wanted to go in to the isolation wing where she normally walked each day. And she didn't understand why the door she used to go through everyday was taped shut and what all of the signs meant saying "DO NOT ENTER! Covid Isolation Unit!" so she just tore the signs down, removed the tape, strolled on in, and hugged all of her friends in the isolation ward that had covid. So, did she die because of covid, or did she die because she had dementia and unwittingly exposed herself to covid which then killed her? (BTW, we don't blame the facility for this, there was lots going on at the time, and they didn't realize that someone would ignore the signs and rip off the duct tape. Obviously they fixed this after what happened with my mother-in-law.)
I mention this here because it seemed relevant to the Mental Illness category.
My 97 year-old Mom on the other hand didn't get covid until after she was vaccinated. She has had it twice now, with no material symptoms (just a runny nose). Go figure.
My mother is 92 and in a care home since late 2021. I told her the reasons I wasn’t getting the vax but she chose to anyway. She’s had Covid since but the symptoms were mild. That generation is tough, having survived the privations of the War years and the Great Depression.
Keep your eye on that y-axis, for I always zoom in to get the juiciest story. Yep, the shift into the COVID bucket is what I'm reckoning.
That's a sad story indeed. My elderly parents managed runny noses for a few days and that was it, whilst their great friend (a health nut) didn't make it. A curious bug all round. A few things stick out and that is their insistence on home-cooked fresh food, a positive outlook, a mobile lifestyle and reluctance to take any kind of pill.
"but then again we don’t have pre-pandemic data.". You know what I'm going to say...
LOL - we're going to need a 10-year run in I reckon!
Those spikes (w/e April 10) are definitely nothing to do with DryJanuary but one might wonder about the spike March-April of UK Midazolam prescriptions, then again nothing to see here, move along, as explained by the ultra reliable FullFact: https://fullfact.org/health/midazolam-video-matt-hancock/
Suspicious innit?
Only to those of a suspicious mind. The final two paragraphs of that FullFact check makes clear that:
<i>Morphine is also specifically used to treat the feeling of breathlessness in certain dying patients with Covid-19, so like midazolam, it wouldn’t be surprising for prescriptions to increase during a rise in fatal Covid-19 infections.
In response to claims that Full Fact checked last year, that elderly people were “culled” with midazolam, the Department of Health and Social Care told us: “These claims are deeply misleading. The government’s top priority throughout this pandemic has always been doing everything possible to save lives.”</i>
You may want to read the patient leaflet under the heading “Other medicines and Midazolam” starting - Concomitant use of Midazolam (there are a number of variations if you search Midazolam)
https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/files/pil.6420.pdf
I don't trust any fact checking organisation these days. Both morphine and midazolam induce respiratory depression in high titration and the latter will also induce respiratory arrest. Morphine is contraindicated for asthma and decreased respiratory reserve. They are used as sedatives and to reduce anxiety and pain but if breathlessness arises from a deteriorating respiratory state then use of either of these drugs is dangerous. I am in contact with investigative teams and medics who have gathered detailed evidence of morphine and midazolam use on a case-by-case basis. I am not able to say more because of legalities.
This is truly shocking. I really can't think this can be anything other than older patients being put on end of life pathways to free up beds for the anticipated Covid avalanche. Or medically sanctioned genocide to call a spade a f*****g shovel. If we had any proper investigative journalists working for MSM organisations they would be all over this but I'm not holding my breath!
It sure is. These are emotionally-charged stats to be churning out right now, so I have a little weep, light a candle, scoff a biscuit and carry on in the hope proper investigation is sanctioned.
Lets assume most of these are people with dementia, though some may have paranoia and severe depression.
I'm not ruling out simple fear and/or isolation as a cause of death.
Its Voodoo medicine: frighten people enough, isolate them from their human support networks, and they just lose interest in living, curl up and die.
Totally with you on the fear factor, plus loneliness and loss of will to live. These would explain the broad spectrum and presumably would have a focused effect in time. My elderly parents were frightened shitless and were convinced a horrible death lay ahead, so I kept in regular contact and gave them military style 'decontamination orders' to keep them occupied. It worked a treat since they felt empowered, and in turn they helped their elderly neighbours.
My Mum and Dad both died in 2019. Of great old age.
My mother - a German War Bride who had survived the Allied carpet bombing of her city - was obsessed by the idea of a new pandemic, and even hoarded food. She was a genuine prepper.
She would have been utterly mortified to know that she missed it by 12 months.
The still-in-date food was donated to the local foodbank. A vanload of it. Mostly horrid stuff like Sauerkraut and Gherkins: I expect they stuck it in the nearest brown bin.
All of this is very disturbing JD, I was looking into this over recent days (not sure if what I’m seeing is accurate) but this came from link below. 26/01/23. am I reading this correctly from table 3a.
These are deaths in “English” hospitals - during March 2020 61.75% of all deaths where Covid was mentioned were in the groups with either “receiving treatment for mental issues” or “learning disability, and or autism”.
In April it dropped to 24.54%
If I am reading it correctly, then the deaths in (English Hospitals) where Covid was mentioned, represent 18.04% through to 26/01/2023
Only an amateur with interest.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-deaths/supplementary-total-archive/
I think you mean table 4a. It's not obvious how they went about this for that list of conditions is far too small by a factor of at least 10! These are not figures I would use or trust.
The numbers confused me too seeming far too low, so thank you for that - yes 4a
Piper’s Lung Disease, also known as hypersensitivity pneumonitis, can be caused by being exposed to fungus from excess moisture within the instrument.
Maybe this is the new problem causing excess deaths in Scotland?