Free Republic

Researchers from Johns Hopkins and the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions looked at 15 diseases and concluded that 371,000 Americans died and 424,000 were permanently disabled as a result of misdiagnoses. About 795,000 Americans die or are permanently disabled every year due to misdiagnosed medical conditions. A new analysis led by experts at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore looks more closely at diagnostic error and its impact. "Prior work has generally focused on errors occurring in a specific clinical setting, such as primary care, the emergency department or hospital-based care," lead author Dr. David Newman-Toker, director of...

Our organizations and many others have called on Congress to provide the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with funding for research into the causes and prevention of gun violence. In addition, we published a joint editorial on gun violence in the Annals of Internal Medicine. These unspeakable acts highlight gun violence as a grim and increasing public health epidemic that kills approximately 91 Americans every day. THIS MUST STOP.

When there is a plane crash in the U.S., even a minor one, it makes headlines. There is a thorough federal investigation, and the tragedy often yields important lessons for the aviation industry. Pilots and airlines thus learn how to do their jobs more safely. The world of American medicine is far deadlier: Medical mistakes kill enough people each week to fill four jumbo jets. But these mistakes go largely unnoticed by the world at large, and the medical community rarely learns from them. The same preventable mistakes are made over and over again, and patients are left in the...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Rhode Island Hospital has been fined $50,000 and reprimanded by the state Department of Health after its third instance this year of a doctor performing brain surgery in the wrong side of a patient's head. "We are extremely concerned about this continuing pattern," health department director David R. Gifford said in a statement Monday. The hospital issued a statement saying it was re-evaluating its training and policies, providing more oversight, giving nursing staff the power to ensure procedures are followed, among other steps. The most recent case happened Friday when the chief resident started operating on the...

<p>The history of medicine is a record not only of brilliant success and stunning progress: It is also a litany of mistaken ideas and discarded treatments, some of which came to appear absurd or downright dangerous after having once been hailed as unprecedented advances.</p>

When a plan to force Connecticut hospitals to disclose mistakes that kill or seriously injure their patients surfaced in the legislature's public health committee last year, lobbyists sharpened their political scalpels. The initiative didn't survive long. Almost as soon as the "mandatory reporting" requirement appeared in an early draft of a bill, it was surgically removed at the behest of the influential Connecticut Hospital Association. CHA officials consider their accomplishment a public service - they argued that the heightened fear of lawsuits and disciplinary actions would have made hospital staff more secretive about mistakes, not less so. But critics say...