That would mean that 86.4% of patients who died in NY hospitals didn’t have a life threatening condition until they were actually in the hospital. Does that mean 5 out of every 6 people who walk into a hospital and die would be alive today if they hadn’t walked into the hospital? Cathedrals of Death indeed …
If a patient has an illness for which no amount of medical intervention will save their lives, and the medical intervention is mistake-free, the patient still dies … okay … makes perfect sense … though it’s not really clear what this fact has to do with death rates due to mistakes in non-terminal patients … if patients are terminal, they’ll be dying anyway.
Errors happen in the game of baseball, but it’s just a stupid game and no one dies. Errors happen in commercial air travel, and every one that results in death is thoroughly investigated and corrections implemented. If some part on a car is prone to failure and is linked to some deaths, every car effected will be recalled and a better part installed. How would we feel if the EPA said toxic spills is just part of the game, get over it … and, no, we have no idea how common mines are like the Gold King mine.
This doesn’t seem the case with hospitals. The Master elegantly and correctly disputes what statistics are available, but He doesn’t give us any better … simply because none are available. Hospitals do not routinely conduct autopsies, so there’s no verification of the doctor’s cause of death. Errors aren’t even looked for, yet people are dying.
I think you misunderstood what Cecil was saying. The key passage:
As I understand it, Cecil is saying that of the total number of patients affected by “adverse events” (a little over one-quarter of which were ascribed to negligence), 13.6% died, and that all patients in that group had life-threatening medical conditions - NOT that 86.4% of deaths in the medical error group involved patients with non-life threatening conditions.
Of course, “life-threatening” does not equate to “would have died anyway no matter what we did”. Still, the points raised in the article are valid, and should make one cautious about accepting the “third-leading cause of death” proposition.
Cecil doesn’t go far enough in his analysis. Suppose, for instance, we have a patient who’s just been diagnosed with insulin-dependent diabetes. With proper ongoing treatment, such a patient can live nearly as long as a healthy individual, with high quality of life. Without proper ongoing treatment, such a patient will die very quickly. Now suppose that the doctor who prescribes the insulin makes a typo on the prescription, and gives a much smaller dose than is appropriate. The patient doesn’t get the needed insulin, and dies. This is very clearly a medical error, and the patient died, and if it weren’t for the medical error, the patient would have lived. But what is the cause of death? You can say that the error was the cause of death, but it’s perhaps even more fair to say that the diabetes was the cause of death: If the patient had had no medical attention at all, the result would have been the same, or worse (the insufficient dose of insulin might have been enough to stave off death for a short time). But if the patient hadn’t had diabetes, there would have been no problem at all.
Of course, this is on top of the fact that lists of the n leading causes of death are always problematic to begin with, as they depend on just how you’re classifying causes of death. We could call the causes of death “Accidents”, “Disease”, and “Homicide”, or we could break that down into categories like “car accidents” and “heart disease” and “firearm murders”, or we could break it down into silly things like “Accidents involving red Hondas”.
No, as Jackmannii said, you have misread. What Cecil says the critics point out is that 13.6% of the cases in the study had fatal outcomes, and all 13.6% had life-threatening conditions to begin with. That doesn’t mean all 13.6% would have died, but there doesn’t seem to be any accounting for how many would have died despite the best medical intervention, no errors.
How can you measure the seriousness of the error if you don’t account for the cases where the bad outcome was not due to the error?
Misunderstandings can indeed lead one to plug numbers that distort the conclusions one can get.
It is fascinating to me to check what doctors and experts reported about the issue, and the most important item here is that there was a lower estimate that was ignored in favor of the higher one was then used by the mainstream media then.
Still, as I read in other articles, even if it was just 20,000 a year, it was important to do something about it, and there was progress made in items like electronic records and advances in technology to help prevent errors.
More about the media misunderstandings from the AMA can be found here:
I agree, however how much further can we carry out the analysis with the data we have without venturing into pure speculation? Just seems very strange that of all human endeavors, health care seems to have almost no effective oversight. In your example, the doctor just writes down “death due to diabetes” perhaps never knowing about the typo. If no one tells the doctor he’s prone to typos, he’ll just keep making them …
Of course, I did note that he didn’t specify if that was a good OMG/thing or a bad OMG/thing. With some of the people I know around here, it would take further research to be sure.
good point but the medical industry also ignore advice and are not allowed to tell patients if a natural treatment would work Here are 3 examples of how its done in Australia.
in the 1940s two medical doctors who were brothers called Shute discovered that Vitamin E was essential to preventing heart disease all of the doctors ignored this advice and when it was tested in the 1980s and confirmed it, it would of prolonged 500,000 peoples lives by an extra 20 years.
A friend of mine had marijuana poisoning in his liver and the hospital staff could do nothing and were even dubious of his claims that he was not an alcoholic his stomach was in intense pain and the only thing that relieved it was to take showers then a specialist came to see him who had written a book on the subject and confidentially told him to take two herbs one being slippery elm bark he can’t remember the other but it maybe silymarin the doctor told him If the hospital found out he would lose his job even though they had no cure to it.
1000 people a year were dying purely because the hospitals were not doing a magnesium test they did not change the rules for quite a while.
the hospitals are not what you think up to 90% of nurses doctors contain the MRSA virus in there mouths/throats yet elderberry juice has been proven to prevent this virus so how many people are being infected only 40% of people are now given an autopsy over here as well.
and one other thing is how many people die from arthritis every year, arthritis can be cured with boron and magnesium yet your pharmaceutical companies are getting your governments to ban Boron,
both governments and pharmaceutical corporations are doing an extremely suspicious job of sacrificing American and European lives to further there own pockets.
Correction: They’re discouraged from telling patients about them at all unless it’s confirmed that they do work. The medical establishment has nothing at all against natural treatments, and in fact they’re all over the place. What the medical establishment has something against is treatments that don’t work. Many natural treatments cause harm, potentially great harm, and it’s not always known which ones.
Physicians can and do recommend “natural” treatments; if however they push (or worse, sell) unproven therapies and supplements for serious ailments where effective treatments exist (and patients come to harm) they may well get into big trouble.
News flash: the “medical industry”, “governments” and “pharmaceutical corporations” are made up of millions of people, all vulnerable to the same diseases as the rest of us, along with all their friends and families. If these supposedly marvelous “natural” treatments worked, they’d jump to use them. Nobody is sacrificing his/her life and the the lives of their loved ones to “further there own pockets”.
Getting back to Cecil’s article, I do think the tone is a bit overly weighted toward “we’re all human and make mistakes”. There’s a lot that can be and is being done to prevent medical errors, both voluntarily and with nudges from payers.
Contrast those efforts with the spectacular lack of initiative by “natural” treatment providers, for whom quality improvement is a foreign term, and who hardly ever dump a therapy or drug that is shown to be useless and/or harmful.
Additionally, natural treatments all start with a healthy diet. If you’re eating right, then your own body will use his/her/its natural defenses against most any illness.
Wow ok he had poisoning in his liver because of marijuana consumption.
all those that think the doctors don’t do this you do not have a clue this is the top specialist in Australia and his words out of his mouth were that he would get the sack.