Get What's Yours for Health Care by Philip Moeller

Author:Philip Moeller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

BAD MEDICINE IS A LEADING KILLER

I wish that Sue Sheridan’s experience was rare, unusual, unexpected, or some other comforting word. It is not.

Each year, an estimated 40,000 to 80,000 people die due to medical diagnoses that caused them to receive the wrong medical care or no care at all. Even the lower range of this estimate is comparable to annual gun deaths. I’m hard pressed to find either epidemic more frightening than the other. There is, however, no public outrage over lethal medical mistakes.

This is likely because people don’t know the scale of medical misdiagnoses. The range of death figures cited here is based on autopsy results, not guesswork. And while avoidable deaths are down slightly from estimates made twenty years ago, the death toll from bad or at least off-base medical advice remains enormous.

The incidence of bad diagnoses that do not lead to fatalities is broader still. A 2014 study found that about 5 percent of all medical diagnoses for outpatients were in error. Based on the number of people interacting with health care then, this worked out to 12 million cases a year.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.