Charges not covered by health plans are absorbed and contribute to increased costs in health care. This Latino population is a new and growing burden on hospitals, with much of it caused by their unorthodox and unsupervised use of pharmaceuticals. One fundamental fact of drug use is that there is an immense difference between oral and injectable products. A patient who is in distress from an adverse reaction to an oral product can have their intestinal tract evacuated on both ends if necessary. This is uncomfortable but effective in removing the offending product from the body.
Drugs administered by injection, however, are virtually impossible to remove once inside the skin.
Treatment is much more difficult, and sometimes it is not possible to save the patient from an adverse reaction to an injected drug. Part of the transplanted Hispanic culture is self-diagnosis followed by the use of injectable drugs. This results in very powerful antibiotics such as Lincocin and Gentamicin being used indiscriminately without a competent diagnosis. Serious allergic reactions or runaway infections and deaths have resulted from using the wrong antibiotic to treat an infection. Even the injectable steroid Phenylbutazone, which can only be used in horses in this country, is available for human use at Tiendas.