The British Medical Journal recently published a paper boasting the astonishing conclusion that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States. Headlines aside, the study suffers from questionable statistics that serve up alarmist conclusions about the prevalence of serious medical errors and obscure the road to addressing the tragic phenomenon of death by medical error.
The analysis cites four observational studies on incidents that occurred between the years 2000 and 2008. This data is at minimum seven years old – and the bulk of it dates from the early 2000s. Presuming that their notably opaque statistical analysis is accurate, the study’s best conclusion is that the third-leading cause of death was medical error between those specified years. One cannot expect such data to be available in real time, but it is equally unreasonable to expect fifteen-year-old data to represent current conditions.
But outdated information is only the most superficial problem with this analysis. The study extrapolated death rates due to preventable error from those four studies, which are vastly dominated by inpatient admissions within the Medicare population. Medicare typically covers only disabled individuals and those over the age of 65: two groups which carry intrinsic risk factors for hospitalization and complications thereof. Extrapolating findings in that population to the general public (which includes everything from healthy children to adults that wholly eschew care in the allopathic system) is disingenuous at best — and quite likely overestimates the rate of fatal medical errors in less risk-prone populations.
Your patients are rating you online: How to respond. Manage your online reputation: A social media guide. Find out how.
No comments:
Post a Comment