Medical errors now third leading cause of death in the U.S., reports new study
05/10/2016 / By D. Samuelson
Add 250,000 reasons not go to western medicine trained physicians. That’s how many deaths were due to medical error between 2000 and 2008, according to safety experts at Johns Hopkins Medicine. On a scale of one to ten, deaths due to medical error is now in third place overall. EurekAlert.org reports:
“Their [250,000] figure, published May 3 in the BMJ, surpasses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) third leading cause of death — respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year.
“The Johns Hopkins team says the CDC’s way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate. The researchers are advocating for updated criteria for classifying deaths on death certificates.
“‘Incidence rates for deaths directly attributable to medical care gone awry haven’t been recognized in any standardized method for collecting national statistics,’ says Martin Makary, M.D., M.P.H., professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an authority on health reform. ‘The medical coding system was designed to maximize billing for physician services, not to collect national health statistics, as it is currently being used.'”
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) uses a coding system that hides the facts about deaths from medical error
USA Today reports:
“Death certificates in this country don’t have a place for hospitals to acknowledge medical error, which the authors say shows reporting needs to be improved so the problem can be better estimated and addressed.
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“Death certificates in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and more than 100 other countries rely on what’s known as International Classification of Disease (ICD) code, so human and system errors can’t be recorded, according to the World Health Organization.
“‘People don’t just die from billing codes,’ said Makary, author of the 2013 book Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care. ‘We do not have an open and honest way of measuring medical error.'”
Health care in the U.S. is really disease maintenance until one dies, isn’t it?
Our physical bodies were originally made from the earthen elements. Plants and herbs were our original medicines and we have been subject to synthetic imitations by pharmaceutical companies for many years. It’s front page news that death from prescription drugs has skyrocketed in the past two decades. Just what is a medical error? The article doesn’t say. Does it include mistakenly prescribing opiates that lead to death, a misdiagnosis of cancer that leads to a deadly chemotherapy, surgical error, vaccinations or just plain western medicine ignorance? Billing codes, not facts, are used to describe how death occurs.
Since 1949, billing codes tally the cause of death, mainly to maximize physician profit
EurerkAlert.org reports:
“‘Incidence rates for deaths directly attributable to medical care gone awry haven’t been recognized in any standardized method for collecting national statistics,’ says Martin Makary, M.D., M.P.H., professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an authority on health reform. ‘The medical coding system was designed to maximize billing for physician services, not to collect national health statistics, as it is currently being used.’
“In 1949, Makary says, the U.S. adopted an international form that used International Classification of Diseases (ICD) billing codes to tally causes of death.
“‘At that time, it was under-recognized that diagnostic errors, medical mistakes and the absence of safety nets could result in someone’s death, and because of that, medical errors were unintentionally excluded from national health statistics,’ says Makary.”
Western medicine kills. The method has been hidden for decades. Time to find healing therapies, don’t you think?
(Photo credit: USA Today)
Sources:
Tagged Under: Death by medical error, Death determined by medical ICD code, Death to maximize physician profit, Hiding the cause of death, International Classification of Disease (ICD), John Hopkins Medicine, Martin Makary M.D. M.P.H., Medical error 3rd cause of death
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