re: Are medical errors really the third leading cause of death in this country?

I believe patients often don't ask enough questions, seek 2nd opinions, or research their condition.

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The bottomline is people are expecting 100% accuracy

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And low prices and immediate service and cheap meds and easy, painless treatment.

Don't go to doctors. You're better off taking your chances at home and not seeking care.

Most studies/research are bullshite......so have to factor that in too

LINK

In response to cwill's original question... Go read the study. You should start to learn to not always trust everything that is published in a journal. I read it. It's extremely speculative and misleading. It's in the British Medical Journal. I could not find evidence of a peer review anywhere.

What they are doing is using small case studies of chart reviews citing medical errors. Taking that percentage and multiplying it by the number of total hospital admissions in the US. When you look at deaths from cardiovascular disease, cancer, etc. All of those are listed on a death certificate, but "medical error" is never listed. So it is easy to determine how many people died from cancer.

If you dig deeper into the studies that they get their statistics from. The numbers are very misleading. For instance, one study looked at ~800 hospital admissions. They found that 12 had what they considered "errors" that directly led to death. However 5 of these were from excessive bleeding from medication administration. Which I'm assuming is anticoagulantion. And these events could be after discharge. Bleeding from anticoagulation is a known side effect. Is it really a preventable error? In addition a physician review found that 9% of those incidents were "more than likely preventable".

So you do the math.
9% of 12 is 1.08
That's 1.08 preventable events per 880
that's 0.12% of hospital admissions
There are 35 million hospital discharges a year (very conservative number considering outpatient procedures, etc. That are not directly dealing with acutely sick patients)
That's 42,000 preventable events causing death per year

While that's a very large number and needs to come down. It's alot less than the 250,000 deaths they are estimating.

Statistics are easily skewed when you have an agenda

Medical errors are often because of the disingenuous nature of the symptoms described by the patient.

Not a front. I'm no physician. I simply understand the nature of people and their unwillingness to be outright.

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Read as much as you can about wellness/health (hint: it will not be in the traditional medical journals...)

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It's highly emphasized in all the primary care journals at present.

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His malpractice involves improper diagnosis/testing because his original doctor did not order a culture and place him on antibiotics. He was not properly referred to a wound care clinic in a timely basis.

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As a nationally certified wound specialist, I am sorry that this happened to your father. Don't assume that referral to a wound clinic would have improved the outcome. While there are some very good wound clincs, patients and medical professionals are very surprised to learn that most wound clinics are staffed by medical personnel who have no credentials to be considered knowledgeable about evidence based wound management. Unfortunately, I review cases of mis-management daily.

Define medical error?



Does deciding that you should have retroactively been able to call cancer in the early stages count?