Medical error

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Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs Melody Petersen See book keywords and concepts

Even if the medical error is reported to Iowa regulators, the information is kept from the public. Only if the state eventually takes action against the doctor does the public learn the briefest of details about the death. By then, many years have likely passed since the patient died. If the family of the patient who dies files a lawsuit, doctors and their lawyers often demand that the court papers be kept confidential.

Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer Shannon Brownlee See book keywords and concepts

While you wouldn't want your primary care physician doing brain surgery on you, the more specialists involved in your health, the more likely it is that you will suffer from a medical error, that you will be given care you don't need and be harmed by it. Unlike in most industries, where demand determines supply, in medicine the supply of everything from hospital beds to doctors determines whether or not you will be hospitalized or undergo surgery, and how much we all will pay for it.

Lack of cooperation in the current system is one of the major causes of medical error, and it encourages overtreatment. We would want our doctors to work as a team not only when we were hit with acute disease or injury but also when we had a chronic condition that required constant monitoring for many years. And while we're asking, we should wish for a system that doesn't consume such a large percentage of gross domestic product. That means we need hospitals to be efficient; they should deliver the best care they can for the lowest cost.

Studies of specific types of medical error suggest that it is not just a small subset of doctors who commit them, a rotten few who are responsible for all the problems. Rather, every physician is destined to make at least one horrible mistake in the course of a career—and most will carry the memory and shame of it for the rest of their lives. It isn't just doctors who err.

To much of the public, medical error seems to be a problem primarily of bad doctoring. We think physicians and nurses who make mistakes are either incompetent or uncaring, or some lethal combination of both. A San Diego surgeon who had no license botched several sex-change operations and cut off the wrong leg of a man who subsequently developed gangrene and died. An orthopedic surgeon became fixated on doing more surgeries than any other physician in his group, sometimes working eighty hours a week to keep up his productivity.

For all the miracles that hospitals deliver, they are also dangerous places, where patients risk suffering a medical error, a life-threatening infection, complications from surgery, or getting a diagnostic test that leads to unnecessary and life-threatening treatment. Beyond the excess deaths that excess health care causes, it is also costing us all an enormous amount of money.

In its 1999 report To Err Is Human, the Institute of Medicine estimated that as many as ninety-eight thousand Americans are killed each year by medical error. Another ninety thousand to four hundred thousand patients are harmed or killed by the incorrect use of a drug—they received the wrong drug, or the wrong dose of the right drug, or two drugs that interacted in the wrong way. A friend of mine was hospitalized recently with a condition that caused her to be partially paralyzed temporarily from the chest down.

Death by Medicine Gary Null PhD, Carolyn Dean MD ND, Martin Feldman MD, Debora Rasio MD, Dorothy Smith PhD. See book keywords and concepts

Until there are codes for medical error, statistics of those people who are dying from various types of medical error will be buried in the general statistics. There is a code for "poisoning & toxic effects of drugs" and a code for "complications of treatment." However, the mortality figures registered in these categories are very low and don't compare with what we know from studies such as the JAMA 1998 study1 that said there were an average of 106,000 prescription medication deaths per year. WHY AREN'T MEDICAL AND SURGICAL PROCEDURES STUDIED? In 1978, the U.S.

Starfield says that, at present, deaths actually due to medical error are likely to be coded according to some other cause of death. She concludes that against the backdrop of our abysmal health report card compared to the rest of the Westernized countries, we should recognize that the harmful effects of health care interventions account for a substantial proportion of our excess deaths. Starfield cites Weingart's 2000 paper, "Epidemiology of Medical Error" on outpatient iatrogenesis.

Until there are codes for medical error, statistics of those people who are dying from various types of medical error will be buried in the general statistics. There is a code for "poisoning & toxic effects of drugs" and a code for "complications of treatment." However, the mortality figures registered in these categories are very low and don't compare with what we know from studies such as the JAMA 1998 study1 that said there were an average of 106,000 prescription medication deaths per year. WHY AREN'T MEDICAL AND SURGICAL PROCEDURES STUDIED? In 1978, the U.S.

The Biology Of Belief: Unleashing The Power Of Consciousness, Matter And Miracles Bruce H. Lipton See book keywords and concepts

But when Mason brought the boy to the referring surgeon, who had unsuccessfully tried to help the boy with skin grafts, he learned that he had made a medical error. The surgeon's eyes were wide with astonishment when he saw the boy's arm. It was then that he told Mason that the boy was suffering, not from warts, but from a lethal genetic disease called congenital ichthyosis. By reversing the symptoms using "only" the power of the mind, Mason and the boy had accomplished what had until that time been considered impossible.

Best Choices From the People's Pharmacy Joe Graedon, M.S. and Teresa Graedon, Ph.D. See book keywords and concepts

Chocolate In his 1973 movie Sleeper, Woody Allen plays a character who ends up in a coma on life support due to a medical error. Two hundred years later, he wakes up to find that the conventional dogma on healthy living has been turned upside down. Woody's character is astonished to learn that wheat germ and brown rice, the ideal of 1970s health-food faddists, are considered terrible choices. Instead, hot fudge and steak are the new health foods. Perhaps the most amazing thing about this "science fiction" is that it may be coming true.

Bottom Line's Prescription Alternatives Earl L. Mindell, RPh, PhD with Virginia Hopkins, MA See book keywords and concepts

Watch for Errors Like a Hawk: This Is Your Life To look at the media today, you'd think that medical error would be the least of your worries—but you'd be wrong. You are more likely to die from medical error than from breast cancer, a car crash, or AIDS. The likelihood of being killed by a medical mistake is 80 times greater than being killed in a gun accident. Taking steps to protect yourself may not win you any popularity contests in the hospital ward but could very well save your life. You can protect yourself by keeping track of what medications you are being given.

Death by Medicine Gary Null PhD, Carolyn Dean MD ND, Martin Feldman MD, Debora Rasio MD, Dorothy Smith PhD. See book keywords and concepts

Leape acknowledged that the literature on medical error is sparse and we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. He said that when errors are specifically sought out, reported rates are "distressingly high". He cited several autopsy studies with rates as high as 35-40% of missed diagnoses causing death. He also commented that an intensive care unit reported an average of 1.7 errors per day per patient, and 29% of those errors were potentially serious or fatal.

Bottom Line's Prescription Alternatives Earl L. Mindell, RPh, PhD with Virginia Hopkins, MA See book keywords and concepts

You are more likely to die from medical error than from breast cancer, a car crash, or AIDS. The likelihood of being killed by a medical mistake is 80 times greater than being killed in a gun accident. Taking steps to protect yourself may not win you any popularity contests in the hospital ward but could very well save your life. You can protect yourself by keeping track of what medications you are being given.

Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele See book keywords and concepts

Berens wrote a three-part series, "Dangerous Care: Nurses' Hidden Role in medical error." Berens described how "overwhelmed and inadequately trained nurses kill and injure hundreds of patients every year as hospitals sacrifice safety for an improved bottom line." In another three-part series in July 2002, "Unhealthy Hospital," Berens tracked a "hidden epidemic of life-threatening infections that is contaminating America's hospitals, needlessly killing tens of thousands of patients each year.

Death by Medicine Gary Null PhD, Carolyn Dean MD ND, Martin Feldman MD, Debora Rasio MD, Dorothy Smith PhD. See book keywords and concepts

Starfield cites Weingart's 2000 paper, "Epidemiology of Medical Error" on outpatient iatrogenesis. And Weingart, in turn, cites Johnson and Bootman, who asked pharmacists to estimate the probability of adverse outcomes occurring as a result of outpatient drug treatment. Statistics showed that between 4% and 18% of consecutive patients in outpatient settings suffer an iatrogenic event leading to:112 1. 116 million extra physician visits 2. 77 million extra prescriptions 3. 17 million emergency department visits 4. 8 million hospitalizations 5. 3 million long-term admissions 6.

TOTAL 164 million Overlapping of statistics in Death by Medicine may occur with the Institute of Medicine (IOM) paper that designates "medical error" as including drugs, surgery, and unnecessary procedures.6 Since we have also included other statistics on adverse drug reactions, surgery and, unnecessary procedures, perhaps a much as 50% of the IOM number could be redundant. However, even taking away half the 98,000 IOM number still leaves us with iatrogenic events as the number one killer at 738,000 annual deaths.

The Medical Racket Martin L. Cross See book keywords and concepts

Increasingly, New York City and state authorities are trying to reduce poor care by inspecting hospitals for egregious cases of medical error. One prominent case involved Jonathan Larson, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Rent, who died after visiting two hospital emergency rooms. After dinner and rehearsal the Sunday before the opening, he suddenly complained of chest pains, dizziness, and difficulty in breathing. He was taken by ambulance to the Cabrini Medical Center emergency room, where they took an X ray and an electrocardiogram, both of which seemed normal.

Whether as a result of infections, drugs, or medical error, the hospital setting endangers a major principle of medicine—Primutn Non Nocere—"First Do No Harm." Some harm is inevitable in the modern medical system of aggressive intervention, which overall creates more benefit than damage. But studies indicate that the typical hospital patient is threatened with considerably more damage than he expects. To take the least conservative view, the patient takes a sizable and often unnecessary gamble every time he enters a hospital.

Prescription For Disaster: Dangers In Your Medicine Cabinet Thomas J. Moore See book keywords and concepts

They proved skillful in limiting the public outcry over this preventable medical catastrophe, and failed to come to terms with the size and consequences of this monumental medical error. A hauntingly similar crisis began in the spring of 1995. This time the drugs at issue were the most widely used medicine in the entire world—a family of drugs called calcium channel blockers. They are prescribed for high blood pressure, and for the chest pains caused by heart disease. Two of the best-selling drugs in the United States are calcium channel blockers— Procardia XL (no. 8), and Cardizem CD (no.

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