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Doctors Best Kept Secret: Hospitals Can Kill You
A Newsweek article this week reports that one of the best kept secrets of doctors is how dangerous hospitals are for patients. Newsweek reports that thousands of Americans are injured or killed by bad doctors, prescription errors, surgical slip-ups and other medical mistakes in hospitals every year. For example, a recent study at a Milwaukee hospital found that 29% of heart echo-interpretations were incorrect!
Yet, patients are largely kept in the dark.
Unnecessary and risky procedures are often performed and place patients at risk, as well. This is really nothing more than insurance or Medicare fraud. Newsweek reports that a number of new studies find that about one in every five medications, tests, and procedures is unnecessary. Harvey Fineberg, M.D., president of the Institute of Medicine and former dean of the Harvard School of Pubic Health has said that 30-40% of health care expenditures are nothing more than payments for fraud and unnecessary treatment. In other words, while patients are led to believe the American health care system is highly competent, it is really more like the wild west.
A 2010 New England Journal of Medicine study found that as many as 25% of all hospital patients experience some kind of preventable medical error and that 100,000 die each year as a result of medical errors. That means that if medical errors was considered a ‘disease’ it would be the sixth leading cause of death in America. The number of U.S. patients killed annually by medical errors and mistakes is the equivalent of four jumbo jet planes crashing each week, something society would never tolerate.
Often, patients are never told that their loved one died as a result of a medical mistake and are led to believe a bad consequence was unavoidable. If you believe you have been the victim of medical malpractice, get answers. It costs you nothing to get an opinion from our experienced medical malpractice attorneys. Contact us for a free consultation.
