For the last couple of days, the Twitter medical community has been discussing the latest in a long line of papers attempting to estimate the role of medical error as a cause of death.
A recent entry appeared in the BMJ and was by a surgeon at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Martin Makary, who claims that 251,454 patients die from medical error every year.
Makary’s review extrapolated that figure from three papers published before 2009 which had a combined 35 supposedly preventable deaths. That’s not a typo: 35 deaths in all. One of the papers stated that all nine deaths in three tertiary care hospitals were preventable. In his BMJ paper, Makary says, “some argue that all iatrogenic deaths are preventable.”
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