Error in your Local Hospital? There are More Errors in Today's NY Times

Fit To Stink

Ugh.

The New York Times (the power of CHRIST compels you!) adds to the unending procreation concerning MEDICAL ERRORS.

As we all know--nowadays better than Grimm's Fairy Tales--medical errors are commonplace, and seemingly not fixable.

As quoted by The Times impeccable government worker bee, Dr. Peter Angood (chief patient safety officer of the Joint Commission, an independent hospital accreditation agency— Whoo-ah!)

An Institute of Medicine report nearly a decade ago highlighted the prevalence of medical errors, and they are still a major problem. There’s been slow progress in the
decline of these errors

Frequent, deleterious medical errors are a given. There is no debate about it (there never has been). It’s always been completely and totally accepted since day one of the IOM report . And why is that? Because it is intuitive to most Americans. The press and the lawyers constantly beat it into our heads that the medical system SUCKS and is always making ERRORS.

The Trains Need To Run On Time

Politicians reinforce the belief in an unendingly error-prone system by claiming a Health Care Crisis (which is what again?) that needs to be attacked, fought, and conquered, like Mussolini’s railway’s system.

Politicos want to help you FIGHT the big drug and insurance companies in addition to the well-lobbied, wealthy physicians – all of whom are obviously conspiring to keep the error-prone system extant and unchanged for their own benefit and to your detriment.

According to Luke

Because the IOM report said it was true (don’t forget, venerable scientific institutions used to say that cigarette smoking was good for you), the fact of rampant medical errors has become GOSPEL. And that without my ever having found one single doctor, politician, scientist, air-head or mother of invention who has read the IOM report or has any friggin’ idea of what is in that report or what they based their completely unchallenged conclusions upon.

What if I told you that the IOM report was WRONG.

Totally.

That errors here, in the U.S. health care system are less than everywhere else in the world? That, actually, we commit relatively few errors?

Would you believe me?

In the Next Issue of BS in Health Care You will Learn How the IOM got it wrong, and why errors in health care are, statistically, less connected to bad health care than earwigs are a cause of deafness.