Medical errors are now the 3rd leading cause of death in the US, study finds
Terrifying.
FIONA MACDONALD
4 MAY 2016
... The most alarming part of all this is that, even though we've all heard the occasional horror story about someone
waking up during surgery or
being diagnosed with the wrong condition, by-and-large, most of us assume medical care is generally pretty safe.
Makary and his team believe this is a symptom of the way the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collect health statistics each year - although medical errors can be detailed on a death certificate, the annual mortality stats only take into account the underlying cause of death, not the potential medical failures that led to it.
For example, if a surgeon nicks a woman's liver during surgery and she dies of haemorrhage the cause-of-death
goes down as cardiovascular, rather than a surgical error....
