Mortality and Cancer Risks, Which Pills to Avoid & Better Alternatives
Last Revised April 2019
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Mortality and Cancer Risks, Which Pills to Avoid & Better Alternatives
FDA Hypnotics Policy Reduces Global Warming:
A Satirical Look at the Bright Side
One wonders why the FDA would endorse hypnotic prescribing that effectively puts a troubled population segment on hospice care and enables assisted suicide. Is it possible that within the FDA is a “deep state” cabal of environmental zealots who applaud the bright side of hypnotics as a countermeasure to global warming? This possibility deserves further explanation.
Recent studies indicate that hypnotics might take as much as five years from the life span of the average hypnotic drug taker. This increased mortality has been mainly among older retired people, who should always avoid sleeping pills, according to the American Geriatrics Society.[82] By endorsing addicting hypnotics, the FDA bumps off old folks and reduces the population. In reducing the U.S. population, hypnotics would reduce those human-made pollutants that cause global warming. I concede an FDA cabal’s actions to reduce the population might have a bright side!
Hypnotics are associated with increased lung and esophageal cancer, perhaps multiplying those risks several times.[83] Apart from shortening people’s lives, those cancers might discourage patients from venturing out and driving around. The cancers could reduce auto exhaust, air pollution, and global warming. The bright side of the FDA approval of hypnotics is that increasing people’s cancer could protect our environment.
Controlled clinical trials proved that hypnotics doubled occurrences of depressed moods and added about 44% to new infections. Several studies suggested that hypnotics increased severe illnesses such as suicide attempts and pneumonia.[84] The FDA’s bright side is that those illnesses often keep people in the hospital or at home, also reducing air pollution from driving. Other risks associated with hypnotics such as falls causing broken hips, more automobile crashes, and accidents of other kinds keep injured people at home.
Hypnotic hangover causes average patients more sleepiness the next day. Generally, hypnotics make people feel more fatigued and less alert. The FDA warns against driving after taking hypnotics. Tired and sleepy people would be less likely to zoom around spewing automobile exhaust, starting fires, chopping down trees, scattering trash around the countryside, and generally damaging our environment. Perhaps this is why the FDA says sleeping pills are “effective” but then tells sleeping pill users not to drive. I have never found a study proving that people with insomnia accomplish more if they take a hypnotic drug. To look at the bright side, addicting people to hypnotics and dragging down their activity would reduce global warming.
It is hard to prove that failing to warn about hypnotics is a secret plot hidden deep within the FDA, seeking to reduce global warming. There could be a more subtle political angle. Those states that tended to have higher overdose death rates had higher 2016 percentages voting for the winning presidential candidate, who scoffed at global warming. The correlation was r=0.38. In other words, hypnotic drugs permanently “put to sleep” those who oppose environmental protection and who refuse to recognize the dangers of global warming! The FDA’s bright side is that sleeping pills tend to rid us of those who vote against saving our planet. FDA zealots might have considered suppression of anti-environment voters the most important hypnotic drug benefit!
Press reports have claimed that a White House physician called “The Candy Man” has given Ambien to multiple White House staff including the President. Allegedly, the Candy man often recorded no medical rationale in medical records, much less the relevant medical history and physical exam. An Associated Press story alleged that the President’s muddle-headed “Covfefe” tweet was attributable to Ambien.[85] Nevertheless, I found no evidence that the Candy Man was colluding with an FDA plot to prevent global warming by impairing White House staff or by assassinating the President.
As the Monty Python song says, always look on the bright side of life.
Endnotes for Chapter 9
82. Fick DM. American Geriatrics Society 2015 Updated Beers Criteria for Potentially Inappropriate Medication Use in Older Adults. J Am Geriatr Soc 2015;63(11):2227-2246. [return]
83. Kripke DF: Hypnotic drug risks of mortality, infection, depression, and cancer: but lack of benefit [version 3]. F1000Res. 2018, 5:918
. [return]
84. Kripke DF: Hypnotic drug risks of mortality, infection, depression, and cancer: but lack of benefit [version 3]. F1000Res. 2018, 5:918. [return]
85. Benac N. Tweet That: #covfefe signals @realDonaldTrump is back. AP News. 6-1-2017. Washington, DC, Associated Press.. [return]
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