Hospital Overmedication

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Infectious diseases have the potential to kill a patient within hours of infection. However, it takes, on average, four days to identification process.

Hospital patients are overmedicated due to the wait time for infection analysis. It is not determined till days later if they have a bacterial or viral infection; and as such if the patient needs antibiotics or symptom treatment. This excessive medication has led to the deaths of patients; on average 440,000 patients die a year (in the United States) from preventable errors, including overmedication. Overmedication is caused by the delay in infection identification and thus a shotgun approach to drug treatment is taken. If patients were not over-medicated hospitals would save both lives and

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