Posted on 04/05/2005 8:33:38 PM PDT by CitizenM
US Gun Statistics - Various Sources - 2-2-5
Guns:
1. The number of gun owners in the U.S. is 80,000,000. Yes, that is 80 million.
2. The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups, is 1,500.
3. The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is 0.000188.
Doctors
1. The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000.
2. Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000.
3. Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171.
(Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept. of Health Human Services)
Statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.
Remember, "Guns don't kill people, doctors do."
FACT: NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN, BUT ALMOST EVERYONE HAS AT LEAST ONE DOCTOR.
Please alert your friends to this alarming threat. We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand!
Out of concern for the public at large, statistics on lawyers have been withheld on lawyers for fear the shock would cause people to panic and seek medical attention.
When doctors aree outlawed, only outlaws will have doctors.
It's more real than you think, given the trials lawyers attack on doctors with their incessant malpractice litigation advertising.
As a result, I sit out in the woods eating asprin. If I go anywhere near a doctor, it involves days spent waiting to see them, and more days waiting for tests, before I get any of My problems solved. I am going to die anyway, but intend to live until I do, on My own terms. I deal with pain better than I do waiting rooms and endless tests.
LoL very good.
Eating aspirins, heh? Well aspirins aren't that all benign either. Not only can they attribute to the cause of ulcers, GI bleeding...an aspirin overdose/salicylate toxicity can be very deadly with a mixed-acid-base disorder. You get a respiratory alkalosis early on then later mixed with a metabolic acidosis. Did you know that only a teaspoon of oil-of-wintergreen, which contains a massive dose of salicylic acid, can easily kill you?
My point was to just to show how good we are at missing what we do not want to hit. (8^D)
There are to many people who have come to the conclusion that it is easier to sue than to just get off their lazy butts and work for their money, or have a dozen kids and have the rest of the nation pay!
God Bless doctors and anyone else who care enough to want to save and or help people!
1,500 sounds pretty low, there are a lot of idiots out there.
Let me know the next time someone uses his doctor to prevent a carjacking or a home invasion.
Yes, of course they're apples and oranges. They can still be compared in certain ways.
lol.......thx for the ping! I needed a chuckle this afternoon!
The actor who plays 'Doc' and the actress who plays "Calamity Jane" are fabulous...
Sorry, don't have HBO, and probably never will.
And here, I thought you called it practice because you were trying to become perfect.
Well, I guess that just shows what I learned, getting a Ph.D. instead of an MD.
Sure, practice makes perfect, but in the case of medicine practice just means more practice. Because just when you think you've got it down perfect, something will bite you in the arse. Happens all the time. It's quite a humbling experience. Let me give you an example of something that happened to me about a year ago. In my career, I've placed thousands and thousands of subclavian central lines without ever a complication and I've done countless cardiac caths. This 73 year old lady came in with a severe lower GI bleed, was extremely anemic Hb=4. On top of that she was also in 3rd degree AV block, hypotensive and needed a pacemaker. She had no peripheral access. With her family consent, I placed a subclavian cordis to give fluid resuscitation as well as to do temporary transvenous pacing. It went in very easy, but she had an iatrogenic pneumothorax, an uncommon but not rare complication of the procedure. For me, I've done this procedure thousands and thousands of times over the years without ever having a complication of a pneumothorax until then. I've done numerous more subclavian central lines since and haven't had a single complication. I was upfront and truthful about it to the woman and her family that a rare but treatable complication happened. The line was established, we gave IVF, blood, and placed a pacemaker. Afterward took her to the cath lab and placed a permanent pacemaker. Saved her life, but gave her a great deal of pain as she needed a chest tube to treat the pneumothorax. After 20 years, I'm still practicing..I will never say that I'm perfect at it because humble pie is something that I've tasted numerous times in my career.
Oh yeah... sure, you PhD's are perfect and have all the answers.
Yep, that is correct. Ahem. Cough. Cough. Actually, we don't have all the answers. I have plenty of stories about things that went wrong. Like an experiment that should have worked--I designed it carefully enough--and I could verify that every step along the way worked, yet the experiment failed. (We work with E. coli, and they do have a mind of their own. They didn't like what I was trying to do to them.) I ended up having to redesign the experiment with one MINOR change, and it worked. Getting a Ph.D. is a process: nothing works, once in a while something works, things often work, things usually work, experiments rarely fail, experiments always work. Then the new Ph.D. starts the post-doc phase, which is a repeat of graduate school except that the time scale is months instead of years between the "never works" to the "always works" phase. I'm on my second post-doc (equivalent, actually, since I'm in the Army now).
Being a practicing MD and not a researcher, I don't think you'd want the failure rate that Ph.D.s accept as part of their work!
Actually, I was a biochemist and chemical engineer prior to going to med school. I worked for a pharmaceutical company for 3 years, got fed up with the corporate world and went to med school. Started out in neurosurgery but after that 1st year of internship, I realized that I did not have the mindset of a surgeon. I didn't complain enough, whine enough, and didn't make everybody else around me miserable enough. The biggest part, though, was that neurosurgeons have no life, especially during the 7 grueling years of training. It was extremely competitive to get a spot and each program has one residency position a year. I got married after med school and my wife gave birth to our first born son midway through my internship year. I needed to be there for my family so I gave up neurosurgery and went into something with more action and fun. I switched to a combined Emergency Medicine and Internal Medicine program. Did 5 years of residency, passed my boards, worked for 3 1/2 years as an ER doc. Burned out from frivolous lawsuits, went back and completed a fellowship in cardiology and been doing it ever since. Emergency Medicine docs have much higher liability risks.
I've done plenty of research work and have published several times in various medical journals. Getting publish was one of the criteria for graduation during residency as well as during fellowship. Publish or perish as they say. I also did plenty of research during my biochem/engineering days too. Yeah, I've jumped through those hoops before.
That was the first thing I ever posted in FR back in 2001 and it was old when I posted it. It is good to see it again, though.
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