Medical Errors Are The Third Leading Cause Of Death -- How You Can Avoid Them

It is astonishing that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in America. The most recent data indicates that 251,000 deaths are due to medical errors, a frightening number. Every person should be concerned about this. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine published that 98,000 deaths occurred annually due to medical errors. This was just an estimate and of course they suggested more studies to confirm this. Recently, investigators at Johns Hopkins Medical Center updated those 1999 figures. They reviewed 4 studies of patients from throughout America between 2000 and 2008, representing over 37 million admissions to hospitals. Medical errors included mistake in medication administration (too much, too little, or given to the wrong patient), incorrect medical plan (patients got the wrong plan for their illness), failure in executing an order, physicians' omitting something that should have been done or ordered doing something incorrect, and medical actions that did not produce the intended benefit for the patients. Fatal errors occurred in 0.71% of these hospital admissions. This percent seems small, but it means that among all hospital admissions in America, 251,000 patients would die annually. And to put this in perspective, 614,000 patients die from heart disease and 591,000 from cancer, making medical errors the third leading cause of death. More people die from medical errors than from lung diseases (147,000 deaths), from stroke (133,000 deaths) or from acci...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news