You and your brethren are the 3rd leading cause of death in the United States. Medical error is rampant, why are you not doing anything about this problem?
How many times have you heard these statistics and others like them? How many times have you been berated by patient safety experts using these very statistics as their foundation and their whip. Have you ever wondered how these statistics could possibly be true when it doesn't jibe at all with your day-to-day experience.
I know I have wondered…
Today, we get to the bottom of this craziness.
Gerard Gianoli, MD
He did an internship in General Surgery and an internship in Pediatrics. Following a residency in Otolaryngology- Head and Neck Surgery, he completed a fellowship in Otology, Neurotology and Skull Base Surgery at the Michigan Ear Institute. He was a full-time Associate Professor at Tulane Medical School until July 2000 when he joined Ear and Balance Institute. He still maintains a Clinical Associate Professor appointment at Tulane in both the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and the Department of Pediatrics. He has published and lectured extensively in the field of Neurotology and serves on multiple Editorial Review Boards for the fields of Neurotology and Otolaryngology.
Dr. Gianoli's Two Pieces on the Medical Error Studies
- Medical Error Hysteria1
- Unreliable Research on Error-Related Hospital Deaths in America – Gianoli and Dunn2
The Makary and Daniel article
More…
References
Additional New Information
More on EMCrit
- Podcast 101 – Avoiding Resuscitation Medication
- Errors of commission vs. errors of omission(Opens in a new browser tab)
- Errors – Part I(Opens in a new browser tab)
Additional Resources
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Scott, see also EMRAP episode 125 from February 2012 on medical error!
Very interesting info on the numbers of in hospital deaths. I would say as someone who has many years of working in health care that I have seen the same error repeated with tragic results. My example would be ETT tube changes. We do them fairly routinely and without incident in the ICU. When done on the ward or in OR by persons who are unfamiliar with the procedure it can go badly. The tubes came out and could not be put back in. Even though RTs who knew the proper procedure were present with the right equipment (tube exchanger)… Read more »
It all started with the Institute of Medicine report. But the main investigator in both of the studies forming the basis of the IOM’s claims later criticized them for hyping the data. See here: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200004133421510
That paper has long since been conveniently discarded in the Orwellian memory hold.
great find!!!!
It’s a shame it had to be a “find.” It should have been publicized but instead was suppressed by the spinmeisters. (BTW I meant to say memory hole, not memory hold).
This is a courageous and long overdue push back on the pseudoscience defining medical error rate. Thank you for pointing out the definition includes …”.failing to achieve the desired result”. This would apply in standard aircraft maintenance (where the definition may have been derived) but NOT in a medical environment wherein the “planes” are kept flying regardless of one or more irreparable chronic adverse states and advanced age and indeed until they crash. I would note that dying as a DNR case does not mean that a medical error did not occur. The DNR designation may have been made after… Read more »
question: Dr. Gianoli cited that 70% of in hospital deaths were the result of a DNR, could you throw me the citation for that number?
how can bmj accept such publication,. yet not surprising. There is also a youtube video of this guy Makary in national television basically talking about this “epidemic”