Epilepsy Talk

Medical Mistakes Out of Control!  | February 11, 2025

Here’s a sobering statistic for you…

Believe it or not, the total number of medical errors and deaths in the U.S. equals SIX jumbo jets crashing every day!

If a Jumbo Jet crashed and killed 280 people everyday…365 days a year…year after year…would you be concerned about flying?

Would you question the Federal Aviation Administration? Would you demand answers?

Think about it…close to 100,000 people dying every year from plane crashes. Sounds Ridiculous??!!

The numbers can be overwhelming and astonishing: The error rate of ICU’s (Intensive Care Units) would be like the post office losing over 16,000 pieces of mail every hour of every day.

Or like our banks wrongly cashing 32,000 checks every hour of every day, every year!

In one decade, the deaths caused by conventional medicine are approximately 8 million. This is more than all the casualties from all the wars America has ever fought in. And that’s just one decade.

In short, the American medical system is the number one killer in the U.S.

One in five Americans (22%) report that they or a family member have experienced a medical error of some kind.

Nationally, this translates into an estimated 22.8 million people with at least one family member who experienced a mistake in a doctor’s office or hospital.

According to a Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the number of paid malpractice claims reported for events in the outpatient setting was similar to the number in the inpatient setting.

Meanwhile, there are now almost “30 times more outpatient visits than hospital discharges annually,” according to the JAMA study, “and invasive and high-technology diagnostic and therapeutic procedures are increasingly being performed in the outpatient setting.”

However, outpatient settings are rarely regulated like hospitals.

So, those hospital procedures that have been deemed effective in reducing errors need to be modified for outpatient settings.

In hospitals, surgical errors are the number one reason patients or their families file malpractice suits (34%), with diagnostic errors (21%) and treatment errors (20%) rounding out the top three.

In the outpatient setting, diagnostic errors were implicated in a whopping 46% of the malpractice settlements, while treatment decisions comprised 30% of the errors.  At 14%, surgical errors were cited far less frequently as the basis for successful lawsuits.

In both settings though, more than two-thirds of the time these errors led to serious outcomes — for outpatients some 70% of the malpractice claims involved death or a major injury like permanent brain damage.

In other words, outpatient care may be just as hazardous to your health.

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) reports that a total of 1.5 million preventable injuries occur each year as a result of lapses in medication safety.

Almost half of these befall residents of nursing homes or other long-term care facilities…about 400,000 afflict hospital patients…and the rest occur in outpatient settings.

Injuries to hospital patients alone are said by IOM to generate $3.5 billion in extra medical costs.

Given that many drug-related injuries go undetected and/or unreported, the report concedes that the estimate of 1.5 million injuries is likely too low.

But as the study titled “To err is human…” asserts: the problem is not bad people in health care — it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer.

Let’s not forget that doctors are people, too. Over worked, overwhelmed, sleep deprived, understaffed and suffer the daily burden of “death” by insurance claims.

My best internist retired a few years ago, long before it was necessary.

When I asked him why, he said: “I went to medical school to help heal people and make them better. I did not go to become an insurance clerk. When you don’t have enough time to treat your patients, it’s time to quit.”

I saw him at a restaurant about a year later. He looked wonderful. Like a different man.

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Another article of interest:

 Study: 1 in 20 Americans Misdiagnosed  http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/04/16/at-least-1-in-20-americans-misdiagnosed-by-their-doctors-study-finds?src=usn_fb

Resources:

http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/305/23/2427.short

http://www.yourmedicaldetective.com/drgrisanti/dangerous_medicine.htm

http://www.newser.com/tag/1119/1/medical-malpractice.html

http://primeinc.org/casestudies/pharmacist/study/812/Medication_Error:_Right_Drug,_Wrong_Route

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK430763/

https://www.mdlinx.com/article/jaw-dropping-medical-mix-ups/lfc-4251

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