Medical Malpractice
by by Lee Karr, PhD

Deaths from medical mishaps, errors and accidents are far more numerous than most of us know. We lose, according to The Center for Disease Control, in the vicinity of 88,000 lives annually to demonstrably avoidable hospital-acquired infections. According to The Institute of Medicine, we lose in the vicinity of an additional 100,000 lives each year to other medical errors and accidents. These are more lives lost unnecessarily each and every year than have been lost in all the wars in all the years since WWII. One of the reasons many of us are unaware of these tragic losses is that they occur one at a time and are usually widely spaced geographically.

In the case of gunshot fatalities, Richard North Patterson in, Balance of Power, emphasized the issue of the relative anonymity of those who died (much like the anonymity of victims of medical errors and infections) by describing them as: “invisible to the media, unknown to the rest of us.”

Because, as with the victims of medical errors, “only the mass slaughter of schoolchildren, or the death of a public figure, ever give us pause.”

Making the same disconcerting point in reference to our lamentable infant mortality rate, Nicholas Kristof in his essay, Health Care? Ask Cuba, (NYT, Jan 12,’04) notes that “Of course deaths in maternity wards occur one by one, and don’t generate the national attention, grief and alarm of an explosion in Falluja or a tsunami in Sri Lanka. But they are far more frequent: every day, on average, 77 babies die in the U.S... ”

Walt Bogdanich has advised us in his Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times series (July 11, 04) concerning deaths at rail crossings, “... these deaths draw little national attention because they usually come one or two at a time.”

Senator Charles Schumer of New York, more recently and correctly commented on the issue of rail crossing deaths: “ . . . because railroad safety is a (national) . . . problem, we need a tough national response.”

Parenthetically, despite these firm and well-intentioned words no “tough national response” has surfaced. Nor has a “tough national response” even threatened to surface concerning our far more costly national medical mishaps. Actually following through on such firm words would require that legislators look some of their most generous gift horses in the mouth, an activity that claims as many legislative devotees within the Beltway, as it does in the corridors of power in Albany. It would require bucking the more than simply formidable medical-pharmaceutical-insurance lobbies.

More recently another category of avoidable medical deaths has begun to come to light, a category additional to the deaths attributed to avoidable infections, errors and accidents, namely deaths due to medical neglect.

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement in a recent release, mirroring an earlier and smaller effort by Duke researchers, revealed, perhaps without intending to, that hospitals that could be encouraged to employ procedures that were well known as being able to save lives, such as administering aspirin to heart attack patients (which is known to reduce mortality effectively) saved truly huge number of lives.

Implicit in this encouraging news, however, was the revelation that many hospitals indeed had not been employing these tried and true procedures. What, one might reasonably ask was that all about? Knowing how to save lives and not doing it? The answer to that question, unfortunately, is beyond the space limitations of this essay.

A necessary first step, however, in modifying the host of unacceptable, even sloppy and uncaring medical practices that contribute to the conservatively expressed rates of avoidable deaths, is to insist to our representatives that a federal healthcare authority is necessary to begin to bring order and authority to our poorly organized and broken healthcare system, a system that kills more people by error, accident and indifference than die as the consequence of terrorism and natural disasters---combined.