Translator: Lujain Alloosh Reviewer: MOSAAB MOHMED zEINELABDIN MOHAMED
If I ask a question:
“I have an infection. What do you advise me to take?”
(antibiotic)
Antibiotics.
This word, which for us is a simple advise
that we can give to anyone asking,
will make me, if I listen to it,
and make you the reason that a premature 11-day-old infant
suffers from an easily curable disease using available medication
but cannot be cured.
Simply because fifty-seven antibiotics have lost their ability to cure her.
This is expected
because whatever the symptom we experience is, we take an antibiotic
and treat it like a bacterial infection,
taking all these antibiotics unnecessarily.
In addition,
in our approach to bacterial infection, we assume that
any antibiotic is useful against an infection,
which is wrong.
We also take extremely wrong doses,
completing a course one day,
doubling it another day,
skipping it in another.
Everything I mentioned so far falls under the random use of antibiotics.
As a result of it,
when an antibiotic enters a body,
the bacteria is familiarised with it, and it evolves in response,
making it lose its effectiveness.
It loses its effectiveness, and we end up with bacterial resistance.
Because of what we do,
We’ll be responsible for 700,000 deaths around the world every year.
And if we keep using antibiotics the way we are now,
by the time it is 2050, we will have been responsible for the death of 10 million
each year.
I am the pharmacist Lena Yahya, and like many others,
I used to think I only needed three things to become a pharmacist.
A counter in front of me, medicines in the background,
and a clean white lab coat.
But the truth turned out to be different.
I’ve realised that it is my duty as a pharmacist
to protect people from using medicines the wrong way
and to explain its harms.
Because I’ve met a large number of people
who think any medication that does not need a prescription is safe,
which is a myth.
Because this is what makes a mother, upon seeing an unserious allergy
that’s normal for her son’s age,
run immediately to the medicine cabinet and grab the first ointment she sees,
pull it and start giving it to him to see outstanding results,
without knowing neither the ointment’s ingredients,
nor what it’s used for,
nor how long it can be used, nor how many times a day.
The result is a mother giving her son cortisone for three months,
though it should not be used for longer than seven days.
Cortisone is great, and because it’s so great, it’s given only for days.
But continuing to use it for longer lead to this result.
This is what makes some kids nowadays, whom we’d call lil’fatties,
but who unfortunately have health issues.
They suffer from a disease called Cushing’s syndrome,
which consists of an increase in the blood-sugar level,
imbalances in glands’ secretions, instability of blood pressure,
morbid obesity,
and bone fragility.
Can you imagine that I’m talking about someone at the start of life, no elderly?
All of this is not the worst of it.
Unfortunately, there is worse.
What is worse is the myth that we hear a lot
that anything natural is safe
and that a herb cannot be harmful even if not beneficial.
Such herbs were the reason I’ve met a child between life and death,
aged 11 years
and suffering from a hereditary illness
that compelled him to take blood thinners.
He had been following his prescriptions, adhering to them, his condition stable.
However, his mother read about the benefits of ginger
and decided to give it to her son.
This caused him acute internal bleeding,
and he was saved at the last minute.
These herbs, which in every house,
when someone is coughing or has a stomachache,
we’re like, let’s hurry and boil some mint or chamomile.
When analyzed, these herbs and many others
were found to be full of toxins.
These toxins are heavy minerals: mercury, lead and arsenium.
We take them in amounts that exceed the limits our bodies can tolerate.
They go straight to the kidneys,
leading to the loss of kidney function in many people who don’t know why
because their lifestyle is very normal.
This has caused kidney failure in children and adults, more in children.
Unfortunately, our journey with this herb issue will be a very long one,
evident by the fact that now in 2021,
80% of people on Earth still view herbs as medicines.
And regardless of all this, we’ll see that
when someone around us gets sick, only three solutions will occur to them:
“I could use a medicine the wrong way, inject a mixture of antibiotics,
or go immediately for herbs and do more harm to myself,
or burn peganum harmala seeds (to dispel evil spirits).
I won’t tell you what the problem with harmala is so as not to scare you,
but the problem is we are almost in 2022,
and the myth of Arabic alternative medicine still exists.
and a myth called traditional treatments,
which is shamelessly used to diagnose children
suffering from diseases very normal for their age like the common cold or colic
with being smitten with envy.
Because the diagnosis doesn’t make sense, the treatments certainly make less sense.
Let me shock you: some treatments are disfiguring,
like ironing
or passing threads through a child’s body
or ears, and many others.
Such treatment methods allow a fraud,
in the presence of parents,
to use something called (saqwa),
a dough full of toxins,
is itself pure poison.
It contains mercury, lead, arsenium,
human nails, animal remains,
and medicines toxic for kids this age are ground with the rest.
Therefore,
when the fraud creates an opening in a child’s scalp
to place the dough on it as well as on the nostril and roof of the mouth,
he chooses the top three places
that pass toxins directly to the kidneys;
they absorb them directly to the blood.
Then the child reaches the hospital,
if ever, as many parents don’t go to the hospital
after realising what happened.
If they do arrive, we lose 7 of every 10 children.
And let’s not speak of hepatitis.
All of us know someone, a relative or neighbor
who was suffering from it at birth, simply because it’s a common disease,
as 60% of newborns suffer from it.
Yet when I say common,
I expect that today we already know how to deal with it,
because we’ve seen it frequently.
But as usual, my expectation was wrong.
As a result of traditional treatment and alternative Arabic medicine,
parents respond to hepatitis by pinning a yellow bead,
scattering garlic around the patients
dressing them in yellow, scattering lentils,
giving them a sugar solution,
which makes it worse,
and exposing them to the house’s neon light,
instead of taking them to the hospital to be dialysed
simply.
All that I’ve mentioned is only a small part of what I’ve seen.
Everything that I’ve seen is much less than what is happening.
In the end, all of this
was the reason that after three years
of thinking about what I’ve seen and the many challenges I’d been facing,
and of hearing very demoralizing words,
I established Awareness of Medication Errors,
the first nonprofit institution
that aims to protect people’s lives
from faulty treatment methods
and make them aware of their harmful effects,
because my perspective had changed
when I realized that maybe we do not need to come up with new medicines
as much as we need to learn how to use already existing ones.
When I first started,
I wanted to research the most common medication errors in children.
One of the most common was using wrong doses,
random doses.
This conforms to our reality,
as we’ve all heard of the three spoons a day,
whether the patient is old, young, fat, thin.
That’s the dose to take.
This prompted me to develop a software that calculates doses for children,
in a more accurate way,
to achieve better medication dispensing.
After that I tried making something that includes more categories
and brought together the most common and serious medication errors
and the most frequent,
against which warnings have been issued by the FDA.
These mistakes
were all included in the first pharmaceutic board game Black Box Warning.
Yet there are people who believe that all I’ve mentioned are isolated cases
and others who think they are limited to a specific community.
I’d like to say this is not true.
It’s a global pandemic called the infodemic.
The infodemic starts with an incorrect information that spreads
and someone pays the price,
either suffering from damage or is killed.
And if you want to know more about what infodemic means,
open your phones
and see the number of health-related messages and posts that you’ve received.
I’d like to tell you that 82% of them are wrong,
regardless of what language it was sent in.
In the end, I want to tell you that a bullet is not the only thing that kills.
It could be a word, or a click on “share” or “forward.”
Be careful.
(Clapping)