Medical Malpractice -- Hospitals Are Killing Us

It sounds as if Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon at John Hopkins Hospital is fed up.  His new book, "Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won't Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care", published by Bloomsbury Press is essential reading for physicians, patients, hospital administrators and anyone who cares about health care in the United States -- yes, it should be read by everyone.

Dr. Makary writes:

"When there is a plane crash in the U.S., even a minor one, it makes headlines.  There is a thorough federal investigation, and the tragedy often yields important lessens for the aviation industry.  Pilots and airlines thus learn how to do their jobs more safely.

"The world of American medicine is far deadlier:  Medical mistakes kill enough people each week to fill four jumbo jets.  But these mistakes go largely unnoticed by the world at large, and the medical community rarely learns from them.  The same preventable mistakes are made over and over again, and patients are left in the dark a bout which hospitals have significantly better (or worse) safety records than their peers."  (emphasis added)

There are a lot of amazingly talented and caring people in the medical care field.  However, as our "medical care field" has turned into the "medical care industry", we have noticed that the industry is more involved in profit-taking and salary than in the patient.  Physician visits where you have to wait over an hour to be seen is all about the maximization of visits to make more money.  Going to a hospital emergency room and waiting many hours for treatment means that the hospital has decided to devote minimum resources to the Emergency Department -- usually visited by people on Medicare and uninsured people and the poor.  Sadly, for the medical care industry it is about the money and quite often, the patient is not viewed as a person in need of treatment, but instead the patient is viewed as a commodity.

98,000 people die each year from medical errors.

U.S. surgeons operate on the wrong body part as often as 40 times a week.

About 25% of all hospitalized patients will be harmed by a medical error of some kind.

If medical errors were a disease, they would be the sixth leading cause of death in America just behind accidents and just ahead of Alzheimer's.

These statistics, provided by Dr. Makary in a recent Wall Street Journal article are chilling enough from a personal safety side.  But Dr. Makary also goes on to note that "...medical errors cost the U.S. health-care system tens of billions a year.  Some 20% to 30% of all medications, tests and procedures are unnecessary, according to research done by medical specialists, surveying their own fields.  What other industry misses the mark this often?"

As long as our medical professionals practice a "closed-door culture", things are going to get worse.  There are two basic reasons that physicians practice this conspiracy of silence when it comes to failing to report or criticize, (let alone self-report or self-criticize) the medical errors of other medical care professionals, (or of themselves.)

The first reason:  Doctors do not like criticizing other doctors.  If they do, quite often they are professionally ostracized.

The second reason:  Medical Insurance Companies who insure doctors -- who are supposed to compensate injured patients when they are injured by the carelessness of a physician -- frown on doctors who report the malpractice of other physicians.

The medical care industry is letting money and insurance run the show.  It is time for change that places the care of the patient first.  There are a lot of great doctors and medical care professionals who do just that.  But there are a lot of professionals in the medical field who won't touch a Medicaid patient nor an uninsured patient.