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Quotes about Medical Error from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"Studies of specific types of medical error suggest that it is not just a small subset of doctors who commit them, a rotten few who are responsible for all the problems. Rather, every physician is destined to make at least one horrible mistake in the course of a career—and most will carry the memory and shame of it for the rest of their lives. It isn't just doctors who err." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "To much of the public, medical error seems to be a problem primarily of bad doctoring. We think physicians and nurses who make mistakes are either incompetent or uncaring, or some lethal combination of both. A San Diego surgeon who had no license botched several sex-change operations and cut off the wrong leg of a man who subsequently developed gangrene and died. An orthopedic surgeon became fixated on doing more surgeries than any other physician in his group, sometimes working eighty hours a week to keep up his productivity." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "For all the miracles that hospitals deliver, they are also dangerous places, where patients risk suffering a medical error, a life-threatening infection, complications from surgery, or getting a diagnostic test that leads to unnecessary and life-threatening treatment. Beyond the excess deaths that excess health care causes, it is also costing us all an enormous amount of money." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"Even if the medical error is reported to Iowa regulators, the information is kept from the public. Only if the state eventually takes action against the doctor does the public learn the briefest of details about the death. By then, many years have likely passed since the patient died. If the family of the patient who dies files a lawsuit, doctors and their lawyers often demand that the court papers be kept confidential." - Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (Get the book.)

"While you wouldn't want your primary care physician doing brain surgery on you, the more specialists involved in your health, the more likely it is that you will suffer from a medical error, that you will be given care you don't need and be harmed by it. Unlike in most industries, where demand determines supply, in medicine the supply of everything from hospital beds to doctors determines whether or not you will be hospitalized or undergo surgery, and how much we all will pay for it." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"The Facts Are Quite Different It is true that some deaths are due to medical error. However, many deaths are due to expected side effects of medications. It has certainly been demonstrated that large numbers of deaths have occurred from faulty FDA regulation and deception by drug companies. The new-look FDA seems to think that when an estimated 55,000 people lost their lives taking Vioxx it was due to the error in judgment of doctors. In 2000 and 2001 one hundred Americans died and many others were injured by Bayer's Baycol (a cholesterol-lowering drug). As of March 2006, they have paid $1." - Byron J. Richards, Fight for Your Health: Exposing the FDA's Betrayal of America (Get the book.)

"For all the miracles that hospitals deliver, they are also dangerous places, where patients risk suffering a medical error, a life-threatening infection, complications from surgery, or getting a diagnostic test that leads to unnecessary and life-threatening treatment. Beyond the excess deaths that excess health care causes, it is also costing us all an enormous amount of money." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "To much of the public, medical error seems to be a problem primarily of bad doctoring. We think physicians and nurses who make mistakes are either incompetent or uncaring, or some lethal combination of both. A San Diego surgeon who had no license botched several sex-change operations and cut off the wrong leg of a man who subsequently developed gangrene and died. An orthopedic surgeon became fixated on doing more surgeries than any other physician in his group, sometimes working eighty hours a week to keep up his productivity." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Studies of specific types of medical error suggest that it is not just a small subset of doctors who commit them, a rotten few who are responsible for all the problems. Rather, every physician is destined to make at least one horrible mistake in the course of a career—and most will carry the memory and shame of it for the rest of their lives. It isn't just doctors who err." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"Chocolate In his 1973 movie Sleeper, Woody Allen plays a character who ends up in a coma on life support due to a medical error. Two hundred years later, he wakes up to find that the conventional dogma on healthy living has been turned upside down. Woody's character is astonished to learn that wheat germ and brown rice, the ideal of 1970s health-food faddists, are considered terrible choices. Instead, hot fudge and steak are the new health foods. Perhaps the most amazing thing about this "science fiction" is that it may be coming true." - Joe Graedon, M.S. and Teresa Graedon, Ph.D., Best Choices From the People's Pharmacy (Get the book.)

"While you wouldn't want your primary care physician doing brain surgery on you, the more specialists involved in your health, the more likely it is that you will suffer from a medical error, that you will be given care you don't need and be harmed by it. Unlike in most industries, where demand determines supply, in medicine the supply of everything from hospital beds to doctors determines whether or not you will be hospitalized or undergo surgery, and how much we all will pay for it." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"We can see how a great deal of sweeping under the rug takes place since nobody is taught what to do when medical error does occur. Leape cited Mclntyre and Popper who said the "infallibility model" of medicine leads to intellectual dishonesty with a need to cover up mistakes rather than admit them. There are no Grand Rounds on medical errors, no sharing of failures among doctors and no one to support them emotionally when their error harms a patient. Leape hoped his paper would encourage medicine "to fundamentally change the way they think about errors and why they occur"." - Gary Null PhD, Carolyn Dean MD ND, Martin Feldman MD, Debora Rasio MD, Dorothy Smith PhD., Death by Medicine (Get the book.)

"Watch for Errors Like a Hawk: This Is Your Life To look at the media today, you'd think that medical error would be the least of your worries—but you'd be wrong. You are more likely to die from medical error than from breast cancer, a car crash, or AIDS. The likelihood of being killed by a medical mistake is 80 times greater than being killed in a gun accident. Taking steps to protect yourself may not win you any popularity contests in the hospital ward but could very well save your life. You can protect yourself by keeping track of what medications you are being given." - Earl L. Mindell, RPh, PhD with Virginia Hopkins, MA, Bottom Line's Prescription Alternatives (Get the book.)

"Berens wrote a three-part series, "Dangerous Care: Nurses' Hidden Role in medical error." Berens described how "overwhelmed and inadequately trained nurses kill and injure hundreds of patients every year as hospitals sacrifice safety for an improved bottom line." In another three-part series in July 2002, "Unhealthy Hospital," Berens tracked a "hidden epidemic of life-threatening infections that is contaminating America's hospitals, needlessly killing tens of thousands of patients each year." - Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business (Get the book.)

"Analyzing why there is so much medical error Leape acknowledged the lack of reporting. Unlike a jumbo-jet crash, which gets instant media coverage, hospital errors are spread out over the country in thousands of different locations. They are also perceived as isolated and unusual events. However, the most important reason that medical error is unrecognized and growing, according to Leape, was, and still is, that doctors and nurses are unequipped to deal with human error, due to the culture of medical training and practice. Doctors are taught that mistakes are unacceptable." - Gary Null PhD, Carolyn Dean MD ND, Martin Feldman MD, Debora Rasio MD, Dorothy Smith PhD., Death by Medicine (Get the book.) "Until there are codes for medical error, statistics of those people who are dying from various types of medical error will be buried in the general statistics. There is a code for "poisoning & toxic effects of drugs" and a code for "complications of treatment." However, the mortality figures registered in these categories are very low and don't compare with what we know from studies such as the JAMA 1998 study1 that said there were an average of 106,000 prescription medication deaths per year. WHY AREN'T MEDICAL AND SURGICAL PROCEDURES STUDIED? In 1978, the U.S." - Gary Null PhD, Carolyn Dean MD ND, Martin Feldman MD, Debora Rasio MD, Dorothy Smith PhD., Death by Medicine (Get the book.)

"But when Mason brought the boy to the referring surgeon, who had unsuccessfully tried to help the boy with skin grafts, he learned that he had made a medical error. The surgeon's eyes were wide with astonishment when he saw the boy's arm. It was then that he told Mason that the boy was suffering, not from warts, but from a lethal genetic disease called congenital ichthyosis. By reversing the symptoms using "only" the power of the mind, Mason and the boy had accomplished what had until that time been considered impossible." - Bruce H. Lipton, The Biology Of Belief: Unleashing The Power Of Consciousness, Matter And Miracles (Get the book.)

"If Leape had, instead, calculated the average rate among the three studies he cites (36%, 20%, and 4%), he would have come up with a 20% medical error rate. The number of fatalities that he could have presented, using an average rate of injury and his 14% fatality, is an annual 1,189,576 iatrogenic deaths, or over ten jumbo jets crashing every day. Leape acknowledged that the literature on medical error is sparse and we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. He said that when errors are specifically sought out, reported rates are "distressingly high"." - Gary Null PhD, Carolyn Dean MD ND, Martin Feldman MD, Debora Rasio MD, Dorothy Smith PhD., Death by Medicine (Get the book.)

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