Are Medical Mistakes the Leading Cause of Death in the US?

Written by Dr Joseph Mercola on June 22, 2022. Posted in Current News

This happens to the tune of about 40,000 events every single day, with approximately 250,000 lives lost each year (about 1 in 10 patients), making it the third leading cause of death in the US. Worse, you don’t even need to be sick or do anything wrong to become a victim of this astonishing trend.

In July of 2000 I was still receiving a print subscription to JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) and I was shocked that they actually published an article¹ from Barbara Starfield, who had an MPH (master of public health) from Johns Hopkins.

Why was I shocked? Because I looked at the data in the article (see below) that physician mistakes were the third leading cause of death in the United States. My article on it went viral and that meme became very popular in 2000, but I was rarely acknowledged as the person who was responsible for it.

Deaths Per Year (From 2000)

• 12,000 — unnecessary surgery
• 7,000 — medication errors in hospitals
• 20,000 — other errors in hospitals
• 80,000 — infections in hospitals
• 106,000 — non-error, negative effects of drugs

These total to 225,000 deaths per year from physician or health care mistakes and are only surpassed by heart disease and cancer.

Starfield’s Ironic Tragedy — A Victim to What She Chronicled

Ironically, Starfield became a statistic to her own research. She died suddenly in June 2011, a death her husband attributed to the adverse effects of the blood thinner Plavix taken in combination with aspirin. However, her death certificate makes no mention of this possibility. In the August 2012 issue of Archives for Internal Medicine² her husband, Dr. Neil A. Holtzman, writes, in part:

“Writing in sorrow and anger, I express up front my potential conflict of interest in interpreting the facts surrounding the death of my wife, Dr. Barbara Starfield … Because she died while swimming alone, an autopsy was required. The immediate cause of death was ‘pool drowning,’ but the underlying condition, ‘cerebral hemorrhage,’ stunned me …

Barbara started taking low-dose aspirin after coronary insufficiency had been diagnosed three years before her death, and clopidogrel bisulfate (Plavix) after her right main coronary artery had been stented six months after the diagnosis.

She reported to the cardiologist that she bruised more easily while taking clopidogrel and bled longer following minor cuts. She had no personal or family history of bleeding tendency or hypertension.

The autopsy findings and the official lack of feedback prompted me to call attention to deficiencies in medical care and clinical research in the United States reified by Barbara’s death and how the deficiencies can be rectified. Ironically, Barbara had written about all of them.”

2022 Updated Medical Mistakes Stats

The video above features an interview between Dr. Peter Attia and Dr. Marty Makary, a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins, in which they discuss the prevalence of medical mistakes in conventional medicine and advancements in in patient safety.

Makary is also a public health researcher, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the editor-in-chief of MedPage Today (the second-largest trade publication in medicine), and the author of two best-selling books.

As a busy surgeon, Makary has worked in many of the best hospitals in the country and can testify to the power of modern medicine. But he’s also witnessed a medical culture that leaves surgical sponges inside patients, amputates the wrong limb, overdoses patients because of sloppy handwriting or enters prescriptions into the wrong patient chart.

Medical Mistakes Are Commonplace

According to a 2011 Health Grades report,³ the incidence rate of medical harm occurring in the U.S. was estimated to be over 40,000 harmful and/or lethal errors daily. Makary cites a 2014 Mayo Clinic survey of 6,500 American doctors, 10.5 percent of whom admitted they’d made a major medical mistake in the last three months.

He also cites a 2015 study by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital that showed about half of all operations involved some kind of medication error. That study and corresponding press release have since been removed and are no longer available online, Makary says. Possibly because the hospital was embarrassed by the results.

In 2016, Makary and his research team published a report showing an estimated 250,000 Americans die from medical mistakes each year⁴ — about 1 in 10 patients — which (at that time) made it the third leading cause of death, right after cancer and heart disease.

According to Makary, that number may be higher, because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not collect vital statistics on medical errors. A death cannot be recorded as a medical error as there’s no code for it.

Of course, since they didn’t do autopsies on every death, that number could also be lower, so the final estimate they came up with was between 125,000 and 350,000 deaths per year.

Another widely-cited study⁵ published in 2013 had estimated the annual death toll for medical mistakes in the U.S. at 400,000 a year,⁶ Makary says. But whatever the true number, and whether it’s the third cause of death or the ninth, medical mistakes are clearly a serious and too-frequent problem.

An estimated 30 percent of all medical procedures, tests and medications may also be completely unnecessary,⁷ and each of these unnecessary interventions opens the door for a medical mistake that didn’t need to happen.

Many doctors have long been concerned about the frequency of medical mistakes, unnecessary testing and overtreatment, but the culture was such that it dissuaded open discussion and transparency.

It’s really only in the past decade or so that doctors and hospital administrators have started being more honest about these problems. Now, a case (discussed below) in which a nurse was charged and found guilty of negligent homicide after accidentally administering the wrong medication threatens to undo much of that progress.

Milestones in Patient Safety

In medical jargon, a “near miss” refers to a medical mistake that could have resulted in patient harm, but didn’t, and “preventable adverse event” refers to a medical mistake that does result in harm to the patient.

A “never event” is one that should never happen, regardless of circumstance. One example of a “never event” would be leaving a surgical instrument or sponge inside the patient.

In 2008, Medicare decided it would no longer pay for “never events,” in an effort to deincentivize sloppiness. Shortly thereafter, private insurance companies followed suit. The following year, in 2009, the World Health Organization organized a committee to address patient safety, as, worldwide, it was becoming apparent that many patients were dying from the care and not just from disease.

At the time, Makary had just published a surgery checklist for Johns Hopkins, and the WHO invited him to present it to the newly formed committee on patient safety. This checklist eventually became known as the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist.⁸ To this day, it hangs on operating room walls across the world.

Later investigations have revealed this pre-op checklist does in fact reduce adverse event rates and save lives. If a loved one is in the hospital, print it out, bring it with you and confirm that each of the 19 items has been done.

This can help you protect your family member or friend from preventable errors in care. It’s available in several languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Farsi, German, Italian, Norwegian and Swedish.

Opioid Overdose Is a Leading Death Among Young Adults

As of 2017, opioid overdoses have been the leading cause of death among Americans under the age of 50.⁹ The most common drugs involved in prescription opioid overdose deaths are methadone, oxycodone (such as OxyContin®) and hydrocodone (such as Vicodin®).¹⁰

Lawsuits that have made their way through the judicial system in recent years have shown opioid makers such as Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, knew they were lying when they claimed opioids — which are chemically very similar to heroin — have an exceptionally low addiction rate when taken by people with pain.

As a result of their lies, doctors handed out opioids for pain as if they were candy. Even Makary admits to being fooled by the fraudulent PR. “That is a form of medical mistake,” he says, adding “I’m guilty of it myself. I gave opioids out like candy, and I feel terrible about it.”

In recent years, the medical industry has cracked down on prescription opioids, making them harder to obtain, but many patients still struggle with addiction, and fentanyl-laced products obtained illegally are still causing many unnecessary deaths.

The RaDonda Vaught Case

In this interview, Makary also reviews the RaDonda Vaught case which, as mentioned earlier might reverse much of the progress achieved with regard to openness and transparency about medical mistakes.

Vaught was hired as a nurse at Vanderbilt hospital in 2015. Two years later, on Christmas eve in 2017, she was taking care of a patient named Charlene Murphy, a 75-year-old woman admitted for a subdural hematoma (a brain bleed). Murphy made a rapid recovery and after two days she was ready to go home.

The doctor ordered one last scan while she was in the hospital, so Vaught brought her to the scanner and ordered Versed (midazolam), a sedative commonly used to help the patient lay still. The hospital had installed an automated drug dispensary system, the alerts of which often had to be overridden due to poor coordination between the electronic health records and the pharmacy.

On this fateful day, Vaught typed “ve” into the system to pull up Versed, but by default, the system populated the search with “vecuronium,” a potent paralyzing agent. Vaught didn’t realize the mistake, and overrode the alert. Now, vecuronium is a powder, and most experienced nurses would know that Versed is a liquid.

Vaught, however, didn’t catch the discrepancy and suspended the powder with saline as indicated and gave it to Murphy, who subsequently died inside the scanner.

“The nurse [Vaught] immediately feels horrible; says exactly what she did, recognized her mistake as the patient was deteriorating, and felt ‘I may have caused this,’” Makary says. “[She] admitted [and] reported this whole thing; was 100% honest. I mean, [she] even said, subsequently, that her life will never be the same, that she feels that a piece of her has died.”

In 2019, Vaught was indicted for reckless homicide.^11,12 She was found guilty and in May 2022, was sentenced to three years probation with judicial diversion,¹³ which means her criminal record can be expunged if she serves her probationary period with good behavior. Her nursing license was also revoked.

Should Medical Mistakes Be Prosecuted?

Now, while Vaught immediately admitted her mistake, Vanderbilt hospital, for its part, appears to have been trying to cover it up.

“Vanderbilt had documentation where two neurologists listed the cause of death as the brain bleed. It was deemed, essentially, a natural cause of death. This was reported to the medical examiner,” Makary says.

An investigation by the Tennessean revealed Vanderbilt did not report the death to state or federal officials as a preventable adverse event, as is required by law. Instead, they fired Vaught and immediately negotiated an out-of-court settlement with the family, which included a gag order.

So, it wasn’t the family that brought charges against Vaught but rather a team of district attorneys in Davidson county. Vaught’s case is the first of its kind, and has triggered emotional reactions across the country among doctors and nurses alike, as everyone knows how easily and frequently medical mistakes occur.

According to the Tennessean, “The case has put a spotlight on how nurses should be held accountable for medical mistakes.” But should they? Never before has a medical professional been criminally charged for a medical mistake that didn’t involve intentional fraud or malice. As noted by Makary:

“One of the principles of patient safety that we have been advocating throughout the entire 23 years of the patient safety movement in America has been the concept ‘just culture’ — a doctrine which says that honest mistakes should not be penalized … That is a doctrine that has enabled people to speak up about this epidemic of medical mistakes in the United States …

In my opinion, we have had decades of progress in patient safety, about 23 healthy years of significant improvements in the culture of safety and the way we approach safety, undone with a single group of assistant young district attorneys that decided to go after one individual at the exclusion of doing anything about a hospital that, unlike the nurse, did not admit to anything initially and broke the law.

There’s a preliminary statistic that 1 in 5 nurses are quitting during the pandemic. Now, some of that is pandemic burnout, some of it’s a number of [other] factors, but a lot of nurses are leaving the profession and there’s this feeling that they don’t feel valued, and this [case] has been a bit of a smack in their face.

So, hospitals around the country that are dealing with critical nursing staffing shortages are trying to pay attention to the concerns that nurses have about this case. I have talked to lawmakers at the state level in different states who are thinking about passing protections for nurses. It’s delicate, but this is now a conversation that has surfaced.”

This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here: theepochtimes.com

See also this video:

Header image: Robert Kneschke

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