Why Do Almost One in Three Americans Experience a Medical Error While Hospitalized?
Start with "Medical Errors in the USA: Human or Systemic", head over to Health Policy Brief: Improving Quality and Safety (04/15/2011) and then try "'Global Trigger Tool' Shows That Adverse Events in Hospitals May Be Ten Times Greater Than Previously Measured". It reminded me of my Great Grandmother who had a serious stroke yet refused to go to the hospital: "You don't ever want to go to the hospital; if you're lucky you come out no worse off than when you went in." Instead she called for big cans of soup from her pantry to use as workout weights to help get her strength back. Ten years later she was given too much of the wrong medication and died soon after. But 102 ain't a bad bad age to make it to especially if you're independent to (almost) the very end.
Finally, ponder "Should the Practice of Medicine be a Deontological or Utilitarian Enterprise?" Maybe our problem here too in the states is that we're stuck with a promise of heroic effort in every case yet able, obviously, to deliver only the effort that knowledge, time and money allow. So instead we make a big production of hospitalization and in the process gather a mountain of analytical test data that can't possibly be adequately analyzed (in no small part because we don't know what most of it means). In the meantime we subject patients to a staggering numbers of unnecessary tests or pointless biopsies and expose them to all the attendant risks including nosocomial infections.
So for now, and for the foreseeable future unless we're willing to admit that medicine knows a whole lot less than it claims, we'll have to settle for beads and rattles.
