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I wasn't aware of this, from the article, which appears to me to be a very, very big deal

> more people died every year as a result of preventable accidents in hospitals than died in car crashes—which was saying something



It's a new finding a quite striking if true

Estimates are ~250k/yr for medical error, ~30k road deaths for the US

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11627213

You can hear the researcher talking about it here:

http://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139


The number of people killed by medical errors thing is a little controversial. People who are about to die anyway get a lot of medical interventions (which is more opportunity for errors, big small). If a patient accidentally gets an extra dose of their antacid 48 hours before they die, is it really likely that error led to their death? Because it would be counted in that 250k/yr number...


Yeah there are question marks about the methodology etc. though it still seems there are a lot of errors https://www.pamedsoc.org/tools-you-can-use/topics/quality-an...


Preventable medical errors are certainly something we should continue to work to reduce (significant progress has been made over the past few decades in that regard).

I'm not advocating complacency, just pointing out that many people think the 250k/yr number is substantially inflated.


> Because it would be counted in that 250k/yr number.

Do you have a citation that these kinds of trivial, harmless, errors are being counted as medical error deaths?


Sure, here's a good overview of some of the controversy with this issue.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/upshot/death-by-medical-e...




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