Researchers: Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States – “Their analysis, published in the BMJ on Tuesday, shows that “medical errors” in hospitals and other health care facilities are incredibly common and may now be the third leading cause of death in the United States — claiming 251,000 lives every year, more than respiratory disease, accidents, stroke and Alzheimer’s.” And yet leading lights like the Surgeon General claim “gun violence,” which results in only a fraction of that number of deaths, is the critical public health crisis of our time. Physicians, heal thyselves. In another example of shameless misdirection . . .
‘Campus Carry’ Gun Bill Is Vetoed In Georgia, With A Lengthy Explanation – “(Governor) Deal also cited another record – one that’s nearly 200 years old: the minutes of an Oct. 4, 1824, meeting of the Board of Visitors of the then-newly created University of Virginia. Noting that the attendees at the 1824 meeting included Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Deal writes that the school’s rules included this line: ‘No student shall, within the precincts of the University, introduce, keep or use any spirituous or venomous liquors, keep or use weapons or arms of any kind…'” As they say in the south, that dog just won’t hunt.
How Germany approaches guns – “We tried to approach this from a neutral standpoint, but most people that own guns look at the pictures and say, ‘Wow, nice guns,’ and people who are against guns say, ‘Wow, what crazy people, how could you photograph them?'”
Kansas bill could allow concealed carry for public employees – As a sneering leftist once asked, what’s the matter with Kansas? Answer: nothing.
One Facebook engineer has reportedly become a big ally for gun rights activists on the site – “Chuck Rossi, director of engineering at Facebook, has reportedly become an advocate for gun groups on the site, helping many get reinstated after they were shut down for apparent sale violations.” Chuck will likely soon be out of a job. Let’s hope someone in the gun industry has something for him to do.
NYPD Approves Springfield Armory XD-S For Off-Duty Use – “Our engineering team developed a new disconnector and grip safety spring that adjusts the trigger pull weight of the XD-S to the specific policy requirements of the NYPD.” So thanks to department mandate, off duty cops will need to use a tire iron in order to set one off?
Oh wow “the guns of Germany” slideshow is depressing. I think there’s actually a tommy gun shaped bottle of liquor in there. And a single box of shotgun shells with no shotgun. And some pelts. There but for the grace of God go us.
And apparently that pathetic display still gives the local anti-gunners the vapors. Go figure.
But I wouldn’t mess with the cat. He/she is heavily armed.
I don’t think it’s too depressing, I think Fräulein looks pretty hot, I’d like to take her out for some fun, at the range of course.
New York trigger on a XDs? No thx.
Leave it to the NYPD to ruin the best single stack subcompact on the market. But there is good news in this. Finally a police department has figured out that there are better pistols than Glock out there.
I wish that was the case, but the G17 is only one of the 3 full sized handguns the NYPD screwed up:
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2012/08/foghorn/nypds-choice-of-firearm-may-have-contributed-to-the-terrible-shooting/
The P226 in Double Action Only is just a travesty.
Well…at least the guns will be of a sporting nature against the perps.
Hey, who asked the NYPD to “approve” firearms for off duty use? WTF does that even mean? And why are they dicking around with the trigger of off duty guns? That doesn’t make any sense.
My understanding is that any regular officer has to carry a department approved handgun, even if they are off duty. ESU and other “special” branches of the NYPD might have different requirements but I’m not sure.
The cdc is already doing the yadda, yadda, yadda on the Johns Hopkins report saying (and I paraphrase) it’s complicated. Twisted facts coming soon.
The Hopkins Center for Public Health is actually the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center For Public Health. Named after the munificent donor that all 2A supporters admire and revere.
So any reports coming out of there are pre-paid propaganda.
That’s true. Follow the money.
251K? I have been seeing between 300K and 400K for the last couple of years.
Guess they decided to shave that number as tightly as they could.
Looks like the numbers may be sort of inflated or at the very least dishonest in that they included EMT’s/ER’s efforts that did not work to save a critical patient. That is, the patient was critical and their rushed attempts to save the patient did not work. Something different may have saved them but there is a distinct difference between emergency care when you only have the time to try one or two of several possible options, and fucking up someones medication or scheduled procedure. It’s sort of like lumping suicides in to inflate gun death numbers.
Still, that is only going to be a portion and it would still likely be #3 on the list. It is always worth noting how the numbers get fudged though.
Interesting. I haven’t read the whole study or drilled down on methodology, so I’ll take your word for that.
Here’s my question, hurried or not, is a misdiagnosis not a misdiagnosis? Don’t get me wrong, emergency medicine is a bitch, and I can fully understand where errors are made – too little info to make the right call. Not to mention there’s no saving some folks. And definitely different than a routine misdiagnosis. But still, isn’t dead because the EMT wasn’t right, still dead?
Regardless, a hundred thousand here, a hundred thousand there, sooner or later you’ve got a body count. For the amount of GDP expended on healthcare, we’ve got really horrible patient outcomes in the US. But that’s a different blog.
Computerized medicine will eliminate many of the problems. There’s too much knowledge out there, and it is impossible for any human, no matter how smart, to keep track of even a fraction of it.
“Here’s my question, hurried or not, is a misdiagnosis not a misdiagnosis?” Yes, but I think there is a pretty clear distinction between the doctor that had weeks to prepare for a surgery and fucked it up, and a scenario where there are five possible ways to save a life, only one may work, and you only have time to try two. Categorizing those two as the same thing is not unlike lumping murders and suicides together as gun deaths simply because both were shot.
Again though, even if you remove the EMT/ER ones that qualify for the above scenario they would still have rank #3 and more than ample room for improvement.
I heard about the figure on the radio yesterday, that it may be much higher. Something to do with medical coding on death certificates that don’t account for/recognize things like diagnostic errors and good ol’ fashioned bad judgement. The guy also mentioned that if someone initially came to the hospital to seek treatment for cancer, heart disease or whatever, and the hospital or doctor F’s up and the death results from an error, often the death cert. will still list the initial reason that the person sought treatment even if the malady itself wasn’t fatal at that point. FWIW
Well, of course! You wouldn’t want the doctor who killed your mother to be sued, would you?
This is also on a par with DGUs where they don’t seem to count unless someone gets shot and/or dies.
What about “medical misadventures” that are caught just in time and the patient does not die? Several years ago my mother was on death’s door with her doctor treating her for a supposed respiratory issue. Finding her in distress I took her to the ER at a different hospital and 12 hours later she had a pacemaker to deal with a severe ventricular fibrulation causing congestive heart failure. Three years later and she’s still doing fine.
I’ll bet that never got into the statistics and there must be many more incidents like it.
So, how many kips are the triggers on the NYC XDS’s…?
omg. The heart of the XDM and XDS is the outstanding trigger. I love ’em.
A NY trigger seems a bit off. Gun folks, that value the Springfields, will buy them for off-duty use. Non-gun-folks – the majority of the NYPD, frankly the majority of law enforcement personnel nationwide – will carry the Glock 19 on and off duty. Fine – let ’em put a 47-pound trigger on theirs. The fact that they’ll need the Jaws of Life to fire it is probably a good thing. But for New York City to penalize law enforcement professionals that, oh, I don’t know….actually know how to shoot a pistol? That’s just meshugganah.
The NY trigger goes back to the late 80’s/early 90’s when the department was switching over from .357 revolvers to semi-auto pistols. The NY trigger was the “compromise” with the dumbass politicians that were worried about bystanders getting hit… oh the irony!
Check it out, it’s an entertaining read:
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/31/nyregion/gun-of-choice-for-police-officers-runs-into-fierce-opposition.html?pagewanted=all
“No student shall, within the precincts of the University, introduce […] keep or use […] arms of any kind…”
Is this a special needs school for amputees and victims of amelia?
If you issued the NYPD water pistols and sharp sticks, an innocent bystander would still get shot.
Maybe the NYPD could be a test case for the White House-mandated smart gun technology?
“….this study, as you can see, is focusing on medical errors in hospitals and “other health care facilities.” Did the researchers do much work looking for fatal errors that occur in average doctors’ offices? If not, the death numbers mentioned in this study are on the low side.
The CDC, which regularly reports mortality figures, doesn’t receive data, nor does it require data, from doctors on errors which lead to patients’ deaths. So the CDC is completely in the dark on the third leading cause of death in the US. This, of course, is the same agency that assures the public that vaccines are wonderfully safe and effective.”
-John Rappoport
Very nicely summed up.
Ok, good to unwind the medical error number and go find other sources, but … use it.
Every time guns as a public health issue comes up, slam them with “200,000 plus dead from major medical errors each year, so why don’t you work on that?”
There’s nowhere for them to go.
“So, you want to be in charge of people’s personal safety at home because you do so well with medical safety?”
“Oh, medicine also saves lives, so you gotta look at that, too4, just like citizens protect themselves with guns …”
“Huh. So, I think 200k a year dead from medical errors is a big deal, just like about the same number of successful D G Us.”
Etc.
This is just appkying one of the Alinsky rules. Thing is, the Alinsky-wielders hate it when their tactics are turned back on them. They’re not used to it; it makes them extra-crazy.
I do think we, perhaps through the gun-hobbyist membership organization, the NRA, should drop Bloomie a note, thanking him for funding this report. When the facts are in your side, as with us, any daylight only helps your cause. We do hope that the former mayor will take the results of his own funded research to heart.
The Starfield study (July, 2000), “Is US Health Really the Best in the World?”, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, came to the following conclusions:
Every year in the US there are:
* 12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgeries;
* 7,000 deaths from medication errors in hospitals;
* 20,000 deaths from other errors in hospitals;
* 80,000 deaths from infections acquired in hospitals;
* 106,000 deaths from FDA-approved correctly prescribed medicines.
* The total of medically-caused deaths in the US every year is 225,000.
* This makes the medical system the third leading cause of death in the US, behind heart disease and cancer.
No slant to that Business Insider article…
Person to person gun sales are perfectly legal. Not like “illicit narcotics” and the other 3xamples in the article.
So, Facebook has banned a legal, person to person practice on their social network. Seems like bad business.
Meanwhile, get the law changed, if that’s what they want. Faceboo’s owners have not been shy about lobbying, supporting candidates and positions, and skewing both their policies and the behavior of their platform. That seems like bad business, certainly treating some users as more equal than others, and something close to abandoning the company’s fiduciary responsibilities.
Says the guy who posted….”There is no constitutional (or more accurately, civil rights, or still more accurately natural rights) hypocrisy in requiring vaccines”. Fail on multiple levels, especially in light of the CDC’s track record, or lack of, for reporting deaths caused by medical errors. This same CDC which is also being accused of outright fraud and manipulating safety data of pharmaceutical products.
Jim glad you resurfaced, you failed to respond to many questions regarding your position of Government/Pharmaceutical control over the public’s medical/health decisions. You posted “Vaccination is arguably part of a program to eliminate, eventually, the root threat. What does taking guns away from good guys do to eliminate the threat of bad actors?” -Yes, vaccination is “arguably” just that, just as gun control is also an argument to eliminate a “threat”. Unfortunately the vaccine argument is not backed by hard science, and even if it were, that would not justify the governments removal of an individuals freedom to make informed medical decisions. And “bad actors”? Never mind.
You also stated that “Meanwhile, vaccinating you does nothing to reduce your autonomy or agency in the world”…Why don’t you say that to the families and individuals who have suffered documented catastrophic vaccine injuries and either have a lost a family member of have been permanently brain damaged and disabled from a vaccine injury?
Coming from the guy who wrote, “Every time guns as a public health issue comes up, slam them with “200,000 plus dead from major medical errors each year, so why don’t you work on that? There’s nowhere for them to go” maybe you can clarify how an industry that is responsible for some 4000 deaths/week should have control over every persons ability to make their own informed medical decision making.
Hello, pg2,
Well, I’m sorry if I left you hanging. I don’t get replies to comments from TTAG any more in my inbox,. Indeed, that checkbox has disappeared for me when commenting. It’s not personal. I do get busy from time to time.
“Jim glad you resurfaced, you failed to respond to many questions regarding your position of Government/Pharmaceutical control over the public’s medical/health decisions.”
I don’t recall taking a “position” on that hereabouts, but might have said something as a side-note. (This is a gun politics site, after all.)
If it helps, in general I’m not a fan of government control of medical / health decision, and think the way the recent federal land grab on this topic was orchestrated was particularly pernicious.
On-point, I think the vaccination / guns analogy is badly flawed when used by anti-gun folk arguing for gun controls, but also any of the other ways I have seen so far. It’s simply a bad analogy.
As for this:
“Says the guy who posted….”There is no constitutional (or more accurately, civil rights, or still more accurately natural rights) hypocrisy in requiring vaccines”. Fail on multiple levels…”
An assault on nature, man, or good sense is not necessarily hypocrisy. There are other ways to be dumb.
– Because the US constitution says “… shall not be infringed.” directly, an attempted constitutional argument justifying “No guns for you!” is hypocritical. Specifically this doesn’t hold up: “Well, the justification is the constitution, except for this part of the constitution here, which justifies what I don’t want.”
The US constitution says nothing about vaccines or medical care, so it’s hard to be hypocritical attempting to argue for either via the constitution. You gotta go a couple steps from “…secure in their persons…” to “No requiring vaccines.” You gotta go a couple more, longer steps from “… promote the general welfare…” to “Get stuck, or else.” So, mandated vaccines are OK, or not, is conflicting interpretation, not direct hypocrisy.
I can make a different case that constitutionally vaccination, or health management are none of the feds business, from “… reserved for the several states or the people…” (I think I got that verbatim. Too lazy to look it up right now.)
– Depending on one’s definition of “civil rights” or “natural rights”, there may be no hypocrisy in arguing “pro” on govt-imposed vaccines from either. If “civil rights” and “natural rights” are what’s encoded in say, current court interpretation, there’s no hypocrisy there at all. I happen to think that’s wrong, but it isn’t hypocrisy to argue that way.
Jim, I’ll be brief, You are correct the constitution does not mention medical care or vaccines, but keep in mind what is outside the Constitution is unconstitutional in that the government is given only certain powers in the Constitution. It’s very unlikely the people who wrote the document could have imagined every angle individual freedoms would be directly challenged by the government.
No need to keep in mind. I said that – paraphrased the text, in fact.
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