The Truth About Medical Errors

"It's one of the Internet's favorite perennial false claims, and it's so persistent that it remains today a current political talking point. It concerns medical errors, which are things like patients being given drugs they're allergic to; bedsores resulting in infection; healthcare-acquired infections; failure to spot things like sepsis; and misdiagnoses or wrong treatments or failure to follow treatment plans. The claim that medical errors like these are the third leading cause of death in the United States is one that you can find plastered just about anywhere you look for it, even though it was never true, and not even close to true. Volumes of papers have been published showing it to be false — and not just false, but false by more than an order of magnitude. Today we're going to find out where this urban legend came from, reveal how we know it's not true, and see why the heck so many people continue to repeat it."

Click on this link for the details.