They Gave Her 30 Prescriptions. She Lost Everything. And Nobody’s Asking Why.

Her name was Lindsay Clancy. She spent her career helping to bring new life into the world as a labor and delivery nurse. 

In the four months before January 2023, 13 psychiatric medications, and more than 30 total prescriptions, were prescribed to her by four doctors and nurse practitioners and a hospital. 

Apparently, none of them talked to each other. But they all prescribed medication, like antidepressants, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines, and sedatives.

On January 23, 2023, she strangled her three children. Cora was 5. Dawson was 3. Callan was 8 months old.

I’m not here to prosecute Lindsay Clancy. I’m here to ask the question that her prescribers should have been asking: What happens to a human nervous system when it’s chemically managed by a committee that never meets?

This is not an isolated tragedy. The data has been hiding in plain sight in respected medical journals for more than 20 years.

In 1999, the Institute of Medicine — a federal body, not a wellness blogger — released a landmark report called To Err Is Human. It found that 44,000 to 98,000 Americans die every year from preventable medical errors in hospitals. More than motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, and AIDS at that time.

In 2000, Barbara Starfield, a Johns Hopkins physician and health policy researcher, published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The study showed 106,000 Americans die every year from adverse reactions to drugs prescribed correctly by trained physicians, exactly as intended. 

In 2016, Dr. Martin Makary of Johns Hopkins published an analysis in The BMJ that found medical errors to be the third leading cause of death in the United States, claiming approximately 250,000 lives per year. 

Dr. Makary also noted something that should stop every one of us cold. The CDC’s death certificate system is structurally incapable of recording medical error as a cause of death, which means the real number may be much higher.

This is data from JAMA, the federal government, and Johns Hopkins, not a social media influencer.

Now think about what you already know from the last 20 years. The opioid crisis did not begin in back alleys. It began in exam rooms and on prescription pads, driven by pharmaceutical companies that knew what they were selling and the risks involved. 

Hundreds of thousands of Americans died. Millions of families were destroyed. And for years, the medical establishment defended the prescriptions.

COVID revealed something else entirely. Protocols were imposed nationally with limited clinical evidence and applied across the board to patients with radically different risk profiles. Dissenting physicians were silenced. Questions about early treatment were dismissed.

The human cost of COVID protocols in delayed diagnoses, untreated chronic conditions, and the psychological destruction of isolation is still being counted.

These are documented historical facts.

Here is what you need to understand. When the CDC publishes the leading causes of death in the United States every year, that list includes heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and accidents. What it does not include, and cannot include, is iatrogenic death. 

Iatrogenic means death caused by medical treatment itself. It’s a word most people have never heard but should be on the front page of every news and health publication in America.

When you add the peer-reviewed estimates together — preventable medical errors, adverse drug reactions, hospital acquired infections, unnecessary procedures — the total number of deaths approaches or even exceeds 700,000. That would make iatrogenic causes the leading cause of death in this country. 

But it doesn’t even appear on the list.

I am a public health professional. I have spent my career believing that the honest identification of a problem is the essential first step to solving it. 

That doesn’t make me anti-medicine. Medicine at its best — emergency care, trauma surgery, targeted pharmacology — is among the greatest achievements of human civilization. I believe that without reservation.

But belief in medicine’s capacity for success doesn’t negate failures that are systemic, documented, and ongoing.

Lindsay Clancy sat across from four different providers. When she received 30 prescriptions for 13 medication, why didn’t any of those providers ask what this combination of drugs is doing to this human being as a whole?

Her children paid for that silence with their lives.

We do not have to accept this as inevitable. We have the research and capacity through health literacy, integrative thinking, and technology to build a better system. A system that coordinates care, identifies root causes, and treats the whole person rather than the billing code.

But we can’t build what we refuse to see.

It is time to see it.

Dr. James Proodian, DC, CCSP, CSCS B.S. Public Health Proodian Healthcare

Sources: Boston Globe — Lindsay Clancy prescriptions timeline. IOM, To Err Is Human, 1999. Starfield, JAMA, 2000. Lazarou et al., JAMA, 1998. Makary & Daniel, BMJ, 2016.