Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States (2016)
washingtonpost.com
Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States (2016)
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Re: Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States (2016)
#2Link to study? I’m curious if this is because of a rise in issues or because medical treatments have managed to reduce all other kinds. Relatedly, are these causes filtered out for where lack of medical intervention would have resulted in death anyway? I suspect not because that kind of data analysis is hard to perform.
Re: Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States (2016)
#3I wonder how much of this is owed to the financialization of medicine where many patients especially in poorer areas are now not seeing a doctor but a 'nurse practitioner', where responsibilities are diffused by design.
Re: Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States (2016)
#4A 2016 study by Johns Hopkins found similar results: iatrogenesis kills 250,000 Americans each year[1].
"The Johns Hopkins team says the CDC’s way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate. The researchers are advocating for updated criteria for classifying deaths on death certificates."
Doctors don't keep a record of the people they kill, just like the military or the police doesn't keep track of the civilians they kill.
[1]https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...
Re: Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States (2016)
#5If you look at the bar chart, you will see: 1. this third is much smaller than the first and second, 2. other categories are carefully divided small categories. The "third" is not a meaningful comparison. A meaningful one should be the percentage of medical errors among medical treatments.
Re: Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States (2016)
#6That Washington Post story is dated May 3, 2016 and now I'm wondering if that justifies flagging the post.
Re: Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States (2016)
#7The year 2016 should be added to the title.
Re: Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States (2016)
#8Re: Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States (2016)
#9How this compares to other countries?
I suspect that if some other country has exactly the same quality of medical care, more people die from medical errors in the US simply because doctors have incentive to order treatments even if risk/reward ratio does not justify it. Especially when patients are elderly.
More treatments leads to more errors with the same error/treatment ratio.
Re: Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States (2016)
#10But how many of these deaths matter?
Did the doctors actually kill them, or did they fail to prolong their life another few days of misery?