Doctors Are The Third Leading Cause Of Death In The US

Dr. Barbara Starfield of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public
Health reports in a paper in the Journal of the American Medical
Association (JAMA) titled  "Is US Health Really the Best in the World?"
how doctors are implicated in medical related deaths in the US:

  12,000 unnecessary surgery
    7,000 medication errors in hospitals
  20,000 other errors in hospitals
  80,000 infections in hospitals
106,000 non-error, negative effects of drugs
225,000 total deaths per year.

Dr. Starfield offered several cautions in considering these numbers:

First, most of the data are derived from studies in hospitalized patients.

Second, these estimates are for deaths only and do not include negative
effects that are associated with disability or discomfort.
Third, the estimates of death due to error are lower than those in an
earlier Institute of Medicine report.
 

If the higher estimates are used, the deaths due to doctors would range
from 230,000 to 284,000.  In any case, 225,000 deaths per year constitutes
the third leading cause of death in the United States, after deaths from
heart disease and cancer (in which medical doctors play a prominent role).
Even if these figures are overestimated, there is a wide margin between
these numbers of deaths and the next leading cause of death
(cerebrovascular disease).
 

Americans Aren't Safe In Outpatient Settings Either

A paper in the British Medical Journal titled "Epidemology of Medical
Error" reported that between 4% and 18% of consecutive patients experience
negative effects in outpatient settings, which result in:

116 million extra physician visits
  77 million extra prescriptions
  17 million emergency department visits
    8 million hospitalizations
    3 million long-term admissions
199,000 additional deaths
$77 billion in extra costs

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