Medical Errors and Negligence: A Cautionary Note about Blind Faith By Mrs. Vera West
Based upon US data, even the mainstream medical journals admit that doctor error, including things like mistakes in prescribing drug dosages, is the third leading cause of death in the US. The World Health Organization claim that medical error accounts for 2.6 million deaths each year, worldwide, with at least 250,000 of those in the U.S., but other authorities put this number as high as 440,000. Then there is diagnostic error, which researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine have described as "the most under-resourced public health crisis we face." Adding together permanent disability and death gives a medical mistake figure around 795,000 annually in the US alone.
As detailed by Dr Mercola below, there have been a large number of measures implemented by hospitals to reduce this error level, but the results have been mixed. As always, the best defence lies with the individual patient.
That involves abandoning the blind faith in the doctor mantra, which if the Covid vax plandemic showed anything, it is that doctors just go with what Big Pharma dictates; "we are not research-based" my ex-doctor put it. People need to become pro-active in medical and health issues, and with the internet, even given censorship levels, it is still possible to investigate conditions and alternatives. Mainstream doctors are trained within the framework that the only effective treatments are those provided by Big Pharma. Yet, for many conditions there does exist peer reviewed evidence for the effectiveness of alternative treatments. One needs to be a detective and investigate all avenues. This is a clear example where knowing the science could help save your life.
"In July 2022, the National Institutes of Health updated their library on medical errors, saying that number could be as high as 440,000 — and possibly even higher due to poor reporting — making it the third leading cause of death in the U.S. A Historical Look at Statistical Data on Medical Errors In July 2010, Dr. Barbara Starfield published an article in JAMA titled "Is U.S. Health Really the Best in the World?" Buried in the tables of that article were data showing that physicians were the third leading cause of death in the United States. I created that headline 24 years ago and it has been a meme ever since. For over 15 years, when you typed in "doctors are the third leading cause of death," my article from 2000 came up first. Of course, those days are now long gone, since Google began censoring me from its search engine eight years ago. Sadly, the claim that "doctors are the third leading cause of death" remains true to this day.
One of the first indications that medical errors were a significant problem emerged in 1989, when professor Lucian Leape from the Harvard Medical School — a pioneer in patient safety who is featured in the documentary — published a study on medical errors. (He also published the book "Making Healthcare Safe: The Story of the Patient Safety Movement" in 2021, which you can read and download for free here.) Leape analyzed 30,000 medical records from 50 New York hospitals, concluding that nearly 4% had suffered an injury caused by treatment, and of those, two-thirds "were caused by an error in care and therefore are potentially preventable," Leape said. Extrapolating from that data, Leape estimated that 1.3 million American patients are injured each year due to medical mistakes and 180,000 die — the equivalent of three jumbo-jet crashes every two days. In the UK, according to statistics cited in the documentary, medical mistakes claim the lives of an estimated 40,000 Britons each year.
Properly Prescribed Drugs Are the Fourth Leading Cause of Death In 1998, another eye-opening study was published. Researchers at the University of Toronto, led by professor Bruce Pomeranz, concluded that properly prescribed and correctly taken pharmaceutical drugs were the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S. Pomeranz's analysis was the largest and most complete of its kind at that time. In all, they calculated that somewhere between 76,000 and 137,000 American patients died each year from correctly administered drugs.
Might Doctors Be the No. 1 Cause of Death? In a 2003 article aptly titled, "Death by Medicine," Dr. Carolyn Dean, Gary Null, Ph.D., Dr. Martin Feldman, Dr. Debora Rasio and Dorothy Smith, Ph.D., described in excruciating detail how the modern conventional American medical system has bumbled its way into becoming the LEADING cause of death and injury in the United States, claiming the lives of nearly 784,000 people annually. Using those figures, that would put the health care system as the No. 1 cause of death in the U.S., bypassing cardiovascular disease. These iatrogenic deaths (meaning deaths resulting from the activity of physicians) include everything from adverse drug reactions and avoidable medical errors to hospital-acquired infections, surgeries gone bad and deaths from unnecessary medical procedures. The authors took statistics straight from the most respected medical and scientific journals and investigative reports by the IOM, showing that overall, American medicine is causing more harm than good. For clarity, the reason Dean et. al. came up with a much higher number than anyone else, even in later years, is likely because they included a broader range of mistakes."Medical errors have been the third leading cause of death for years, with 10% of all deaths being attributable to some kind of medical error, and it continues to be a leading cause of death today, ranking somewhere between third and first place, depending on the scope of medical mistakes you include in your equation."
Medicine Is Still a Leading Cause of Death In 2010, a report in The New England Journal of Medicine, and another in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, revealed just how little things had changed since 2003. Out of 62 million death certificates dated between 1976 and 2006, nearly 250,000 deaths were coded as having occurred in a hospital setting due to medication errors, and an estimated 450,000 preventable medication-related adverse events occurred every year. Three years later, in 2013, a Journal of Patient Safety study concluded preventable medical errors kill anywhere from 210,000 to 440,000 patients a year. In 2016, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts, led by Dr. Martin Makary, calculated that more than 250,000 patients died each year from medical errors — the same death count found by Starfield in 2010. Then, in 2022, the WHO announced that unsafe care by medical professionals and hospitals result in a "horrifying" 2.6 million deaths annually, worldwide, with at least 250,000 of those deaths occurring in the U.S. And, as mentioned, that summer the NIH stated the death toll might be closer to 440,000, or more. So, medical errors have been the third leading cause of death for years, with 10% of all deaths being attributable to some kind of medical error, and it continues to be a leading cause of death today, ranking somewhere between third and first place, depending on the scope of medical mistakes you include in your equation.
Misdiagnosis Rates Are on the Rise Death isn't the only outcome of medical mistakes. Permanent disability is another. When permanent disability and death are lumped together, the toll from medical mistakes reaches as high as 795,000 annually in the U.S. alone, according to data published in 2023. Researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine have described diagnostic errors as "the most under-resourced public health crisis we face." When you visit a doctor, whether you're at a doctor's office or hospital, you depend on getting expert care, including a correct diagnosis. But about 11% of the time, medical conditions are misdiagnosed. The likelihood of misdiagnosis varies widely, however, depending on the type of medical problem and the symptoms presented. For instance, only about 1.5% of heart attacks are misdiagnosed, compared to 62% of spinal abscesses, a rarer condition. But even among strokes, a leading cause of disability in the U.S., misdiagnosis occurs more than 17.5% of the time. When a stroke occurs, some patients may experience only dizziness or headaches, which can easily be confused with other conditions. In all, 15 diseases account for 50.7% of the serious harms due to misdiagnosis while just five — stroke, sepsis, pneumonia, venous thromboembolism and lung cancer — account for 38.7%. A 2023 review of nearly 300 studies by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality also found that a startling number of patients who visit U.S. emergency rooms get an incorrect diagnosis. Overall, their research showed about 1 in 18 people who visit an emergency room will be misdiagnosed, 1 in 50 will suffer an adverse event as a result, and 1 in 350 will suffer from permanent disability or death. Out of the 130 million visits to emergency 19 20 21,22 23 24 25 departments (EDs) that occur every year in the U.S., this amounts to 7.4 million misdiagnoses, 2.6 million related adverse events and 370,000 serious harms from diagnostic error. According to the authors: "Put in terms of an average ED [emergency department] with 25,000 visits annually and average diagnostic performance, each year this would be over 1,400 diagnostic errors, 500 diagnostic adverse events, and 75 serious harms, including 50 deaths per ED ... The strongest, most consistent predictors of ED diagnostic error were individual case factors that increased the cognitive challenge of identifying the underlying disorder, with nonspecific, mild, transient, or 'atypical' symptoms being the most frequent."
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