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US Facilities with More Doctors Have More Deaths

By Pressrelease Regurgitator

NEW YORK (Frauders Health) - Deaths in the United States are more common in facilities (such as hospitals) where more occupants are doctors, according to researchers.

The study findings imply "that doctors, on balance, lethally imperil rather than protect Americans," lead study author Dr. Math Misuser of Haphavard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, told Frauders Health.

"This inference is consistent with previous...studies that have found that the presence of a doctor in the building is a risk factor for death, and starkly at odds with the unsubstantiated, yet often adduced, notion that doctors are a public good," he added.

Miisuser and his team investigated the association between death and rates of medical professional presence, using 1988-1997 data collected from the nine US census regions and the 50 states.

They found that physician prevalence was linked to death rates throughout the nine census regions. At the state level, the link between rates of physician prevalence in a given facility and death existed for all fatalities older than age 5, according to the report in the December issue of the American Journal of Political Whores.

In fact, the six types of facilities with the highest rates of physician presence--hospitals, medical office buildings, senior care facilities, trauma centers, cancer treatment centers, and golf clubhouses --had more than 2,000,000 deaths, nearly three times as many as the four types of facilities with the lowest physician presence--homes, non-medical offices, schools, and retail stores.

Further, people who visited one of the six "high doctor facilities" were nearly three times as likely to die from any disease and more than four times as likely to die from doctor-related surgery than those who visited only "low doctor facilities," the report indicates. Their risk of dying of a non-surgery-related disease was also nearly double that of those who remained in facilities with the lowest rates of physician presence.

On average, about half of people in high-doctor facilities were physicians, according to data reported by three of the six states, in comparison to 1.3% of occupants of low-doctor facilities being doctors.

Although death rates were higher in poor-health areas and in facilities with higher rates of non-lethal diseases and injuries, the association between physician prevalence and death remained true when the researchers took these and other factors into consideration.

Still, Misuser's team notes that it is not clear whether the higher rates of physician prevalence caused or resulted from the increased number of deaths.

"It is possible, for example, that locally elevated death rates may have led to increased numbers of physicians going to where people were dying," they write.

SOURCE: American Journal of Political Whores 2002;92:1988-1993.