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Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

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Re: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

#61

Post by giantg2 »

ncmncm wrote: post #55
giantg2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don't aircraft have more or less standardized controls and displays?" Commercial pilots (and military) are required to train and qualify on a particular aircraft before being allowed to fly it. Controls can differ, but it's generally the difference in flight characteristics/handling that is the difference. Although we can see that the different computer related controls and lack of training were a factor in the Max…

The main cause was completely insane specifications. With a reasonable design the plane would not have become uncontrollable under any possible sequence of events, training or no, familiarity or no.

True, but we live in an age where we we trust our lives with computers so that we can do things we couldn't do otherwise. Flight control computers are necessary for most new commercial and military aircraft because they're fly by wire or can be uncontrollable by nature (Max, V22, etc). We're at the point that the FAA and people in general don't care about an inherent instability if the computer can fly it.

Re: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

#62

Post by smcl »

bloak wrote: post #58
zeroth32 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think "age" is a valid cause of death. > so the cause of death was ...? Age?

One of the main purposes of recording cause of death is so that we know what to concentrate on for improving public health. For example, perhaps we could make old people's bones less brittle by adding vitamins to bread, or do something to persuade more of them to eat something other than just bread and jam, or perhaps we could stop them getting infected with pneumonia in hospitals, or somehow make pneumonia more surv…

I agree and I might add that we probably don't want to normalise the idea that the elderly just randomly die of "old age". That could easily result in a decline of standards in hospitals and elderly residential homes, or it could even give the Harold Shipmans of the world free reign to do as they please: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman

Everybody dies and we can't deny that, there likely won't be some breakthrough within my lifetime where we conquer death. But we should still be striving to understand the causes, to know whether someone died because of heart failing due to being really old[0], or whether it was down to something preventable or that otherwise indicates a failure in our system

[0] - not a doctor, I don't know what sort of things they normally use for this. Substitute an actual cause of death if this doesn't sound right :)

Re: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

#63

Post by Aeolun »

DicIfTEx wrote: post #20

And a sizeable portion of that medical error is due to poor device UX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XJbwN6EZ4I

You’d think they do user studies before selling it to hospitals where people literally die as a result of failure…

Re: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

#64

Post by willcipriano »

kuu wrote: post #25
bambax wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah... Thanks... Unintended consequences strike again.

Not so sure it is unintended...

This predicable outcome was either on purpose or the nation is ran by a cabal of people with severe cognitive impairment.

What's better?

Re: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

#65

Post by zeroth32 »

bloak wrote: post #58
zeroth32 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think "age" is a valid cause of death. > so the cause of death was ...? Age?

One of the main purposes of recording cause of death is so that we know what to concentrate on for improving public health. For example, perhaps we could make old people's bones less brittle by adding vitamins to bread, or do something to persuade more of them to eat something other than just bread and jam, or perhaps we could stop them getting infected with pneumonia in hospitals, or somehow make pneumonia more surv…

Fixing old people is incredibly ambitious. How about we concentrate on low hanging fruit first? Young person with broken hand, knife stabbing, or dog bite comes into hospital, gets treated, leaves 2 hours latter. Nobody gets bankrupt, has to sell kidney, nobody waits 20 hours....

> getting infected with pneumonia

And old age is an infection as well, right? ...

Re: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

#66

Post by pjc50 »

sschueller wrote: post #46
DicIfTEx wrote: post #20

And a sizeable portion of that medical error is due to poor device UX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XJbwN6EZ4I

This is insane. These device UIs should be standardized and any manufacturer making a significant UI change to their product should not be permitted to sell it under the same name and number. The FDA should be looking at this before approving such devices for use. Don't aircraft have more or less standardized controls and displays?

Good way to make medical tech even less feasible and affordable.

Re: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

#67

Post by giantg2 »

“Incidence rates for deaths directly attributable to medical care gone awry haven’t been recognized in any standardized method for collecting national statistics,”

That's because they're hard to standardize. What qualifies as a medical error? It's easy to go back after the fact and analyze a case where someone has a poor outcome and say 'we should have done this another way'. That doesn't mean there was any indication at the time that the other way would have been better or that the poor outcome could have been foreseen.

I do believe there are a lot of medical mistakes made. I'm a little skeptical that there are legitimately 250k that result in unnecessary death each year. I assume many of those 250k were being treated for serious illnesses that may have taken their lives anyways (not all medical interventions are 100% effective). It would be nice to have a standardized definition, but I'm not sure how that's possible unless we are only talking about treatment received was different than treatment ordered.

Re: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

#68

Post by rdedev »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #23
andreareina wrote: post #13

Or maybe not: https://youtu.be/Jbsy7VObyyM

He’s apparently so important and busy that he has to make these videos while driving in his super car from point A to point B. 15 years ago, this “content” would have been a blog post, which we could have skimmed in 30 seconds to get the gist of the counter argument. Now it’s a 10 minute video with no notes, buried behind 2 ads. Next time, give us a 2 sentence summarization of the argument you’re linking.

Well to be fair to the guy in the video, he is a practicing cardiologist in the UK. https://www.youtube.com/c/MedlifeCrisis/videos

Afaik he does mostly videos and dont do blogs. Anyways one argument presented in the video (but dont know if its relevant to this post) is that the datasets used sometimes dont differentiate between medical error and medical harm. Medical harm is where you need to do a particular intervention, but the possible side effects of the intervention leads to the patients death. Furthermore the line between medical harm and medical error is fuzzy especially when you dont have all the information at hand when doing the procedure. The datasets for the papers mentioned in the video were retrospective

Re: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

#69

Post by peoplefromibiza »

giantg2 wrote: post #67

“Incidence rates for deaths directly attributable to medical care gone awry haven’t been recognized in any standardized method for collecting national statistics,” That's because they're hard to standardize. What qualifies as a medical error? It's easy to go back after the fact and analyze a case where someone has a poor outcome and say 'we should have done this another way'. That doesn't mean there was any indicatio…

> It's easy to go back after the fact and analyze a case where someone has a poor outcome and say 'we should have done this another way'

summarized by the meme

it takes two wipes to know you need three, but three to know you needed two

Re: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

#70

Post by formerkrogemp »

freeone3000 wrote: post #14
bambax wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> insurance companies don't want to work with them I'm not familiar with the peculiarities of the US healthcare system, but why wouldn't insurance companies work with off-brand medications? If it costs less it's good for them, no?

Medical insurer's profits are limited to a percentage of their gross income, so, more expensive medications and procedures are preferred to less expensive ones in order to preserve overall income.

No, they're required to spend at a minimum 85% of the money they receive from premiums on healthcare or healthcare quality improvement. As the price of medical procedures goes up, so does the 15% amount that they're allowed to keep and so too do the premiums rise to increase their income.
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