Now, as we all know, apples and oranges cannot be compared in a meaningful way, so the statistical “analysis” is invalid. But, I was wondering about the relative accuracy of the statistics given. Is this correct? 120,000 sounds like a lot of medical mistakes resulting in deaths. That could mean that, on average, 1/6 of all doctors cause an accidental death each year. I did a little searching and came up blank on “real” statistics.
This may or may not be a great debate, but I put it here because it has a gun control angle.
I guess the other statistics that would be interesting are:
Number of pre-meditated deaths caused by physicians per annum
Number of pre-meditated deaths caused by gun-owners per annum (registered and un-registered)
If it’s any help at all, I’ve been on the horn to HHS and other initial named organizations and here’s what I’ve found:
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services keeps no statistics on this sort of thing under its umbrella.
A subsidiary, the National Health Information Research Center does not keep such statistics either, but referred me to the National Center for Health Statistics. They track no such number. They even asked around for about ten minutes, because it’s an interesting claim. They were very nice, however, and referred me to the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, where I left a message for Steve Cohen. I am awaiting his return call.
MHO is that this is a cooked number. It’s a blockbuster statistic and if it were true these people would know about it or it would show up on a web search. I’ll let you know if I get anywhere.
The numbers the e-mail cited seem cooked but (assuming you can validly compare apples and oranges) their “point” still holds. I don’t support gun control but this type of argument is ridiculous.
The number of malpractice deaths cited above comes from the web site of a personal injury law firm - take it with a grain of salt. They claim to haqve gotten the number from a Harvard study, but they didn’t cite.
-Beeblebrox
“I am so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis.”
I think I oughta point out that the cited Web page admits it extrapolates from a Harvard study to get its numbers.
That study is cited elsewhere as “Harvard Medical Malpractice Study. Patients, doctors and lawyers: Medical injury, malpractice litigation and patient
compensation in New York: The report of the Harvard Medical Practice Study to the State of New York. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Medical Practice Study, 1990.”
I haven’t been able to find a link to the study itself, or to a source that does more than take a couple of quotes out of context.
I don’t think it was intended to be an argument per see. I think it was merely a tongue in cheek shot at some of the arguments used to show how dangerous handguns are.
One figure that has been accepted as gospel comes from a 1999 Institute of Medicine study that estimated that 44,000 to 98,000 people per year die due to medical mistakes. The high-end number is referred to frequently and is used as a tool to institute new regulations. However, a more recent study concluded that those figures were wildly inflated.
While I don’t view the NRA as horrible bogeymen, I still don’t want Charlton Heston to take out my appendix.
“About 18,000 out of 31,000 people who commit suicide in the U.S. every year do so by gun.”
This means that of the 30,000 gun-related deaths (!) reported by that same article, at least 18,000 were suicides and were therefore not murders. And this doesn’t account for gun accidents or legitimate use of guns in self-defense or law-enforcement.
Well, certainly, we can’t directly compare these two numbers. Consider that a doctor is used far more often than a gun (several times a day compared to several times a year). Additionally, how many of those 120,000 Deaths By Physician involved people who were terminally ill? How did they determine if a physician was responsible? If a patient overdosed on their prescription medication, and subsequently died, was that the fault of the physician?
If I were you, LateComer, I’d ignore the E-mail. There are MUCH better methods of debating pro-gun stances than trying to demonize a completely unrelated subject.
tracer, I know you well (by posting history) and I have a good deal of respect for you. I do not own any guns myself (yet), but I believe that everyone should have the right to own a firearm.
This is crap. This is serious misinformation. It may be for a defensible cause, and it may be tongue in cheek, but it is definitely glurge. And I can’t support it, no matter whether I agree with it or not. Ignorance is being propagated here, not fought.
