Will The Real Kellene Bishop Please Stand Up...: New Number One Killer in America

I’ve recently read several studies which claim that heart disease and cancer are the number 2 causes of death in the United States. Unfortunately both of these numbers have not earned their respective positions as the number one and number two killer in the U.S.

The Institute of Medicine brought the travesty of the killings of American citizens to light. In the 1999 report To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System put the annual death toll due to hospital care 44,000 to 98,000. However, other reports including on study published by Jama put the deaths at 225,000! Dr. Milt Hammerly MD assesses the annual body count at 204,000-301,000 killed by medical treatment each year. In other words, medical malpractice kills more American citizens each year than does heart disease or cancer.

Based on the fact that most institutions under-report their errors, Hammerly believes his estimate may be conservative. The high end estimate, developed in a 2003 report led by long-time nutrition-activist Gary Null, PhD, concludes that the annual mortalities due to medical intervention are between 783,000 and 999,000. The report, based on compilations of published studies of others (in addition to those in the JAMA article), concludes that medical intervention is the Nation's #1 killer.

Only half of NHS trusts fully comply with all the safety standards that they are expected to meet, and they do not always have effective systems in place to understand risk, properly report incidents or learn from them, the commission said.

Do you wonder why these deadly incidences aren’t improved? It comes down to good old fashioned ego.

Undoubtedly the healthcare industry hasn't been able to respond as swiftly to this problem as the airline industry did when it was confronted with serious problems two decades ago. The reason is a common scenario in which a pharmacist, or a nurse, notices something problematic in a patient's chart or prescription history. When one suggests a change, "the doctor gets huffy, indignant that the nurse or pharmacist is moving into his authority area."

In 2003, approximately $40 billion was spent on homeland security to prevent another terrorist attack like 9/11. If even a fraction of this effort had been spent on reducing preventable medical errors in hospitals the outcome would be monumental. The reality is that there has been no national collective will to change the deadly statistics. According to the follow-up 2005 IOM report, there has been little change in reducing preventable hospital tragedies since the 1999 IOM report. Why isn’t more done by oversight organizations to alter this deadly path? Money and denial.

Given the state of the economy at present, no doubt if hospitals were required to implement certain safety and management procedures additional costs would be involved. This would undoubtedly lead to the healthcare industry requesting their own bail out money. Yes, once again we have a situation of “we’ve screwed up, so can you pay us to undo our mess?” On the other hand there is a sizeable force of experts who continually claim that such a problem is not significant enough to require sweeping changes to the industry. Apparently they deem the number of deaths in ratio to the number of patients treated as a tolerable status.

Funny. You hear of one single solitary death as the result of someone misusing a gun and all of the 2nd Amendment Haters start opening their mouths and their pocket books to fight against Americans using firearms to protect themselves. (There are a total of 1500 accidental gun related deaths each year) And yet these same haters would leave us helpless and subject to the evident lack of expertise and integrity in the medical industry. In the meantime, malpractice insurance rates go up, so medical care costs go up in an effort offset the costs, and our insurance costs go up to prohibitively large premiums. And yet so much could be avoided if more professionals focused on mastering their chosen craft.

You have the right to protect yourself from all harm. If any medical advice to you doesn’t sound right, clear, or logical then ask for clarification or second opinions. Just because the doctor only planned on spending two minutes with you doesn’t mean that’s all you’re entitled to.