[phunel]

No offense Alex3917, but really - Philip Atkinson is your authoritative source?? Not sure why this is getting upvoted. Quote from his site, re: his experiences growing up -

"Everything about us was different, and we were naturally resented. While the neighbouring [sic] adults never confronted my father, their children were delighted to bully his children. My siblings and myself became social half-castes, accepted by no class and despised by all. The result in my case was an initial bitter resentment of my community, along with the traditional notions that I should pursue a university education then a career; so I dropped out of school to take a job as a bus conductor...

With determination, skill and a little luck I forged a career in computers before being forced into retirement in 1991...

Of course I could have restarted the education that I abandoned in my teens, but by then the true nature of universities had become obvious; they were no longer centres of learning pursuing truth but centres of profit pursuing customers. Inevitably striving for popularity with youth has made universities bastions of Political Correctness, and full of the kind of people who wanted to burn Galileo for daring to question that the sun circled the earth. So I spent my enforced idleness applying the skills acquired as a system's analyst to discover why my society is disintegrating into delusion and impotence...

In January 2000 I became an Internet publisher, placing a variety of books 'online' at my own expense, in an attempt to preserve some of the vanishing wisdom of humanity...

Indeed I am the first philosopher to realise that philosophy is the study of understanding."

Hmmm...

[Leptosiphon]

Errors and mishaps pose a substantial risk to hospitalized patients. Iatrogenic injuries affect as many as 18% of patients admitted to hospitals in the United States, at a cost estimated to exceed $100 billion per year.

Weingart SN, Ship AN, Aronson MD (2000). "Confidential clinician-reported surveillance of adverse events among medical inpatients". J Gen Intern Med 15 (7): 470–7. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1495482/?tool=pm...

[sparky]

This seems a more appropriate response to Alex3917's "at least question the journal articles" bit, as it supports phunel's point fairly well I think.

The "as many as 18%", "admitted to hospitals" and "Iatrogenic injuries" bits make this article say something dramatically different than "1 in 3 of all Americans (not just those hospitalized) die because of an error made by a physician".

[Alex3917]

There is actually a new study that just came out that the NY Times cited a week ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/25/health/research/25patient....

Even still that doesn't have much relevance to the 1 in 3 claim, because most people go to the doctors more than once in their life.

[Leptosiphon]

It wasn't meant solely as a response to Alex3917, I just thought it might be useful to add something actually from a peer reviewed journal to the discussion :)

[sparky]

You thought right, it was a great find; thanks :)

[Alex3917]

If you're going to question the source then at least question the actual journal articles instead of just ad homineming the guy citing them. They're all from respectable sources like JAMA.

[phunel]

A third of all Americans dying of medical malpractice is simply a fairly bold claim.

Again, no offense - please feel free to quote the JAMA article itself that supports this. Atkinson does a bit more than simply cite actual journal articles, he's taking, to put it lightly, some liberties with information he compiles and personally interprets at will.

[Alex3917]

"A third of all Americans dying of medical malpractice is simply a fairly bold claim."

Not really because because most people only die after 4 or 5 things go wrong, which means that the causes of death sum to way over 100. E.g. close to 1 in 3 Americans die from drug use, and 7 out of 10 Americans die from chronic illness. But the way it works is that first someone will start smoking (drug use), which then causes chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (chronic illness), and then they will go to the hospital get MRSA because the doctor didn't wash his hands (iatrogenic death).

In Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers there is a whole chapter on planes that is actually very similar, in that usually 4 or 5 small mistakes have to be made to actually cause a crash.