“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird
― Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird
Dear Eliquis users or future users,
Ask your doctor if Eliquis is right for you. If approved then ask yourself if gastrointestinal bleeding is right for you. Following that ask if family members are committed to making daily and weekly trips to see you in the hospital. Next ask yourself if you’re ready for the biggest fight of your life. Then ask your family members if they’re ready to bury you. And finally ask if you’re ready for your twenty year old granddaughter to ask to file a law suit against Eliquis. Have you asked the questions? I’m sure you didn’t. I’m sure you assumed what your doctor was prescribing you was safe. That’s exactly what happened to my grandfather, except we weren’t asked those questions, we lived through them. But the shocker? This isn’t the first time Eliquis has done this to a family and you can bet it’s not the last time either. We’ll come back to this but first a brief background on why Eliquis is now a forbidden word in my household. In the spring of 2016 my granddaddy went to the doctor and was diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat. The thought was to shock it back into rhythm. In doing so they needed to put him on a blood thinner for about a month. He accepted this and started taking the newly prescribed medication. Within a few days he started having gastrointestinal bleeding. My mom immediately took him to the ER and they did a colonoscopy and several other tests but could never find a cause of the bleeding. From the start of the bleeding until the tests were done he was given fifteen pints of blood. To give you a little retrospect of how much blood that is, there are eight pints in one gallon. So they ended up giving him a little less than two gallons of blood. TWO GALLONS!! That’s two milk jugs. The doctors chalked it up to being from the Eliquis so following that my granddaddy refused to take it. Little did we know that Eliquis was not done haunting and terrorizing our family. About a month later he began bleeding again, and again there was no real diagnosis only speculation. In the end, doctors basically told him that he could have his colon removed or he can be admitted to hospice and slowly bleed to death over the next three months. In the end he ended up passing away three months later (he did have his colon removed). So there you have our not so nice encounter with Eliquis. So for those of you who are wondering exactly what Eliquis is (other than obviously a blood thinner), Eliquis is an apixaban that’s used to prevent serious blood clots from forming due to a certain irregular heartbeat (atrial fibrillation) or after hip/knee replacement surgery. With atrial fibrillation, part of the heart does not beat the way it should. This can lead to blood clots forming, which can travel to other parts of your body (such as the lungs or legs) or increase your risk for stroke. So why am I saying to avoid Eliquis like the plague? After two rounds of gastrointestinal bleeding it was time to figure out what exactly my granddaddy put into his body. What did my mom and I find out? Well after reading arguments, trials, and the struggle of Eliquis getting approved we found ourselves asking why the hell it ever got approved in the first place. To begin with, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration delayed its approval for nine months. Following that we found that a large study was used to prove the drug’s safety and efficacy was heavily flawed. Some of these flaws include: inaccurate and missing data, patients receiving incorrect medication, patients receiving incorrect doses of medication, and failure to report adverse events, including deaths. Ummm FAILURE TO REPORT ADVERSE EVENTS, INCLUDING DEATHS!?!? That’s a major flaw! But these are just flaws with the study that was done on the initial drug. What’s another scary fact about Eliquis? There’s no antidote to it. Unlike older anticoagulants, Eliquis does not have an antidote. In December 2015, Portola Pharmaceuticals submitted an FDA application to approve an antidote for Eliquis and Xarelto. But, in August 2016, the FDA rejected it. *Note that all blood thinners increase the risk of serious and uncontrollable bleeding, which can lead to death. With no known antidote, doctors are limited in their ability to treat the side effect if it occurs. FDA Approval and Clinical Trial Cover-ups At one of the Chinese sites, records were altered and covered up and numerous good clinical practice guidelines were violated. Some include failure to report four adverse events, reported three adverse events late, and left three medical outcomes out of the data. It was also discovered that patient data sometimes vanished before FDA investigators visited. It was also discovered that a large amount of participants received the incorrect medication or incorrect dose of medication. A flaw in the study’s design caused some patients to receive a double dose of the drug or no drug at all, putting many people who needed some form of anticoagulation at a risk for stroke. Eliquis’ label wanted to add the drug caused less deaths than that of warfarin. The label would have claimed the drug demonstrated a significant reduction in all-cause mortality when compared to warfarin. If allowed, it would mean the manufacturers could claim people who took Eliquis died less often than those on warfarin, something Pradaxa and Xarelto couldn’t claim. The data from the trial indicated, with an extremely small amount of statistical significance, that the drug was safer than warfarin. However, one FDA reviewer said the significance was so small that if just one more person had died, the stat would be insignificant. The reviewer also criticized trial reports which indicated patients who had died were visiting doctors. Lawsuits The first lawsuit was filed by Deborah Herschel in July of 2015, a year before my granddaddy went into the hospital for the second time due to gastrointestinal bleedings. Donald Herschell, died from gastrointestinal and brain hemorrhages while taking Eliquis. Two months after beginning treatment with Eliquis, Herschell suffered gastrointestinal bleeding that doctors were unable to control, and died in the hospital that same day. The lawsuit claims Bristol-Myers and Pfizer concealed knowledge of Eliquis’ defects from the Herschells and their doctor. Mr. Herschel died from gastrointestinal hemorrhages, sound familiar? Eliquis direct-to-consumer ads were highlighted in a recent study published in Medical Care, where several experts complained that the ads misrepresented the level of preference prescribing physicians had for the drug. Let’s add another scary factor: It is important to note that out of the new generation of blood thinners, doctors know the least about Eliquis. Since it is so new, Eliquis has the least amount of bleeding injury reports, which means physicians are not fully aware of the nature of Eliquis bleeding injuries. A recent study published in the Journal of Neurosurgery stated that Eliquis lacked an extreme amount of experimental and clinical data available to the medical community. So family, friends, and strangers, to recap, the side affects of Eliqius are hemorrhage: serious bleeding in the gastrointestinal tract, serious bleeding in the brain, and serious bleeding within the eye. Ask your doctor if it’s truly safer than warfarin. Ask yourself if you know someone who takes this drug if they’re aware of this? I know that all blood thinners have a side affects that can lead to death but how many of them have had major screw ups and flaws in the actual drug. How many times do you really ask your doctor about the side affects? Do they get brushed over until you actually have a side affect. Do you really listen to the side affects on the drug commercials? I urge you to start listening. I urge you to ask questions. I especially urge you to call your doctor or share this information if you or a loved one takes Eliquis. I don’t want anyone else to ever go through the pain and suffering that I saw my granddaddy go through. If you’re not going to do it for yourself, do it for your friends and family. Do it for your grandkids. Do if for this stranger who lost the best man she ever knew. With a heavy heart, A Gearle who doesn’t want you to take Eliquis
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Abby & AndreaA college student trying to figure out the world with her mom by herside. Life through my lens (Abby). We all have different stories and these are only some of mine. Some funny, some adventurous, some hard. Sit back and relax. Enjoy. Archives
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