posted 01-07-2005 03:11 AM         

I'm a family practice doctor. We sure as hell don't make enough money to buy a yacht. In the popular imagination, Blue Cross Blue Shield backs up a dump truck full of $1000 bills to every doctor's office every day. In reality, doctors make less money than is generally perceived.

The proposed cap on malpractice claims is intended to address the jackpot justice phenomenon where patients sue their doctors for so much money that the malpractice insurance company has to stop insuring new doctors, or even has to go out of business. Some pregnant women have had trouble finding obstetricians to manage their pregnancies because of this phenomenon.

I'd be interested in knowing the source of the statistics. I did a web search and found a lot of pro-gun rights websites that said the data came from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Interestingly, a search of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services website revealed no such statistics. (Probably deleted by some doctor from his yacht).

A few years ago, the National Institute of Medicine estimated that medical mistakes kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people per year. If that's true, it means medical errors kill more people each year than car accidents, breast cancer or AIDS. Obviously, this is a little hard to believe. The wide range of "44,000 to 98,000" was a tip-off that something was wrong.

posted 01-07-2005 09:57 AM         

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C) The percentage of accidental deaths per gun owner is 0.0000188. Statistically, then, doctors are 9,000 times more dangerous to the public health than gun owners.

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Of course cars, something near and dear to all our hearts, kill far more people in the US each year than guns. P.S. Don't tell the anti-gun lobby about this or they'll all have to walk home from their rallies.

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Originally posted by CTProwler:
I only know the Doctors and Dentists around here are making a lot of money.

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Doctors are like house builders. Yes, there are some that build multi-million dollar homes but, the vast majority of them build in the under $100K region. I think the national average for a doc these days is something like $86K.

Out of any profession, docs have the highest rate of filing for bankruptcy. How many other professions do you know that when you just get out of school, you already have a $200K+ bill tied around your neck?

Also, malpractice insurance rates are in the stratisphere. My neighbors wife is a doc and she is paying something like $80K a year. Alot of practice areas (ie. OB/GYN) are losing alot of folks and new docs are not getting into it because rates are even higher in those areas.

Also, with a home, if you make a mistake, you fix it. If a doc makes a single mistake, it could bankrupt him and he's outta business.

With surgery, alot of folks don't know that most deaths aren't from being under the knife, it's from the anesthesia. Not even doing anything wrong but, the patient's body chemistry just reacts violently to it.

It's also, almost impossible for a new doc to hang out a shingle these days with all the doc-in-a-box places hiring scads of $50K/yr. foreign docs.

posted 01-07-2005 10:46 AM         

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In a book review of Atul Gawande's Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, Ivan Oransky notes that medical errors are a serious problem. Unfortunately Oransky repeats claims that vastly overestimate the extent of the problem. Oransky writes,

Three years ago, the National Institute of Medicine estimated that medical mistakes kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people per year. If that's true, it means medical errors kill more people each year than car accidents, breast cancer or AIDS . . .

While some researchers have successfully poked some holes in the estimates of the number of patients killed by errors, the real effort should be aimed at ways to change the practice of medicine to make it safer.

Lets back up there. If some researchers have poked holes in the claim that 44,000 to 98,000 people are killed every year by medical mistakes, then what exactly is the extent of the problem? Just what sort of holes have others poked in the National Institute of Medicine's figures?

Well, as this site pointed out last August, Rodney Hayward and Timothy Hofer pointed out enormous holes in the NIM figures in an analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Their look at the NIM study suggested that the actual number of deaths from medical errors is in the range of 5,000 to 15,000.

The basic problem is that doctors do not agree on what constitutes a medical error. What Hayward and Hofer found is that if you show a patient's case history to enough doctors, you'll inevitably find someone who disagrees with the treatment regiment that the patient received.

So the number of medical errors depends a lot on how such errors are measured. If the consensus of a panel of medical experts is used, then the number of medical errors is relatively small. If a medical error is considered to be any case history where even just one doctor on a panel says it was a medical error, then the result is the high numbers seen in the NIM study.

If the accurate figure is 15,000 rather than 98,000, then far more precaution needs to be taken when introducing computerized diagnostic systems to ensure they really are going to lead to a reduction in medical errors.

Source:

Robo-docs. Ivan Oransky, M.D., Salon.Com, April 9, 2002.

posted 01-07-2005 12:01 PM         

for them I thank god

block-buster