Hyperbole is seldom helpful. Especially when it comes to medical errors.

Josef Stalin famously said: “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” Perhaps 250,000 preventable deaths from medical errors, according to an analysis by Makary and Daniel in the BMJ, maketh a Stalin. The problem with Makary’s analysis, which also concluded that medical errors are the third leading cause of death, isn’t the method. Yes, the method is shaky. It projects medical errors from a series of thirty-five patients to a country of 320 million, which is like deciding national spice tolerance on what my family eats for dinner. The problem with Makary’s analysis isn’t that it is full of assumptions. Assumptions are inevitable in biomedical research, and abundant in health services research. Researchers of medical errors must determine whether a bad patient outcome, such as death, was avoidable. Bad outcomes lie in a spectrum between inevitability and preventability. If every death is inevitable doctors are rendered impotent, and if every death is avoidable doctors are rendered omnipotent. (FWIW, I prefer omnipotence.) Continue reading ... Your patients are rating you online: How to respond. Manage your online reputation: A social media guide. Find out how.
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Tags: Physician Hospital Malpractice Source Type: blogs