“Incidence rates for deaths directly attributable to medical care gone awry haven’t been recognized in any standardized method for collecting national statistics,”<p>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.<p>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.
An important factor to consider any time you see really worrisome things like medical errors or suicide as leading causes of death: counter-intuitively, that can be good news. Every time you solve your #1 highest priority problem, your #2 becomes your new #1. At some point, if you have good-enough solution for a broad-enough range of problems, the only option left is that your biggest problem is now failing to apply those solutions correctly!<p>By way of example, let's take a look at WHO data[0]. Across Europe, the leading cause of death for children under 4 is congenital anomalies. That sounds bad in isolation, but is actually pretty good in context. First, because the actual rate at which children die from congenital anomalies in Europe is a fair bit lower than the world-wide average, but most importantly because those anomalies float to the top simply by virtue of every other cause of death being exceedingly rare.<p>0. <a href="https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-details/GHO/deaths-per-1-000-live-births" rel="nofollow">https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...</a>
And a sizeable portion of that medical error is due to poor device UX: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XJbwN6EZ4I" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XJbwN6EZ4I</a>
apparently based on very flawed arguments<p><a href="https://gidmk.medium.com/medical-error-is-not-the-third-leading-cause-of-deaths-ff13c71851b" rel="nofollow">https://gidmk.medium.com/medical-error-is-not-the-third-lead...</a>
I wonder what the average/aggregate expected loss in years of life is due to this. It's very different to make a fatal error on somebody with a life expectancy of 1 year vs 50 years. This data doesn't seem to be discussed in the article.
The US incentivises blaming healthcare providers in order to recoup costs. I'm sure there are issues with substandard care, but I'm not sure the data can be fully trusted given that putting the blame on a healthcare provider in any way possible is often in the best interests of the patient.
I believe it. In my 40+ years of dealing with the medical profession, Dr. Google, Dr. Wikipedia, & Dr. Pubmed have wiped the floor with them, time after time. If you get sick, do the research. I can almost guarantee that it will pay off.<p>And these days, medical research is excellent--if only by volume. I know people here like their canned responses--"<i>small n!</i>", "<i>in mice</i>!", "<i>correlation != causation</i>"--but when you're trying to make a diagnosis, every little clue helps!<p>I can't honestly attribute excellence to the typical medical practitioner.
Forgetting the measurement issue with no standardized definition of what even constitutes a medical error, this is still a very poor way of framing a change in rank. Is the absolute rate at which people are killed by medical errors higher than it used to be? Is it higher than in comparable countries? Or did the rank change because the old 3rd leading cause of death now kills fewer people? Those are very different pieces of news and this press release doesn't indicate which is the case.
From personal experience and friends and family experience, I actually am surprised it is <i>only</i> 250k annually in the U.S.<p>> The researchers caution that most of medical errors aren’t due to inherently bad doctors, and that reporting these errors shouldn’t be addressed by punishment or legal action. Rather, they say, most errors represent systemic problems, including poorly coordinated care, fragmented insurance networks, the absence or underuse of safety nets, and other protocols, in addition to unwarranted variation in physician practice patterns that lack accountability.<p>I respectfully disagree. All these are systemic problems as indicated and need to be solved by a revamp of the whole system. They are not magically going to fix themselves, there is no financial incentive to do so.
It may actually be good news. Depending on how the stats are made.<p>That a death qualifies as a medical mistake means that proper treatment existed. For example let's say that 50% of people die from "the plague". The plague is lethal and untreatable, no medical mistakes can be made because nothing can be done. One day, a cure is found, cheap and 100% effective, unfortunately, the procedure is tricky and as a result, 1 out of 5 times, it is done improperly and the patient dies.<p>In the end, 4/5 cases survive, which is great news, is used to be zero, but if we look at the share of deaths because of medical mistakes, it has increased a lot.<p>Of course, it needs to be fixed, but usually, it is something we know is fixable, better than a disease without treatment.
I’ve seen this stat many times and I believe it is very misleading.<p>I believe this isn’t compared to no intervention. It is compared to a perfect intervention.<p>This kind of claim pollutes reasonable discussion.
If a person is depending on medical intervention to stay alive, and the situation is permanent, it seems inevitable that their death will be a "medical error".
What is the "Nth leading cause of X" depends <i>entirely</i> on how you choose to classify causes.<p>To say something informative, give the percentage.
The latest Peter Attia Drive podcast episode has an interview with Dr. Makary where they examine the issue of preventable medical errors in more detail.<p><a href="https://peterattiamd.com/martymakary2/" rel="nofollow">https://peterattiamd.com/martymakary2/</a>
It "surpassed... respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year."<p>For proportion, according to the CDC[1] there were an estimated 100,300 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 12-month period ending in April 2021<p>Although this report is from 2016, which was before COVID and mandatory masking. WebMD says that in the interim, deaths from respiratory diseases have also soared, but I couldn't find any numbers.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/20211117.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...</a>
Lots of these are drug interactions. Have a symptom? Here is a drug for that. Doctors rarely check and often are not aware of the potential for harm. Seniors taking 2-3 dozen drugs regularly are not uncommon and often feel much better when medications are removed from their regimen. Data science should be able to help at both ends connecting problems with drug interactions that trigger them and then warning of possible problems when considering or prescribing medicines.
Relevant: the US spends double the amount of other countries on healthcare, yet has a life expectancy 3 years shorter.<p><a href="https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low</a>
Tempted to use that "always has been" meme template here.<p>As an ex-doctor, I can tell you that I very quickly realised that at the top of my "surgical sieve" (a mnemonic that helps docs consider categories of differential diagnoses) one should always start with the category "Iatrogenic" before considering other, more textbook-medicine differentials.<p>And also that for some reason, most doctors seem to treat this category as last on the list, if they think of it at all.
Makes sense, everyone I met in college who said they were pre-med would immediately suffer narcissistic injury and refuse to be professional in any future context when I'd remind them Pitt has no pre-med program then go back to doing whatever I want on the wifi.<p>(I also met a few folks who took what they needed to do well on the MCAT then also did some practical courses on information science or focused on art so they could have something to do that would let them turn off their brain after work other than binge reality tv, and most of them are doing OK.)