400,000 deaths per year

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Gunfounder

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Medicine Section: Saginaw News July 16, 1999 page 3A. AP wire service and LA Times

HMO chief: Mistakes kill 400,000

Washington - Denouncing the quality of American health care, the head of Kaiser Permanente said Wednesday that blunders by doctores and other health-care professionals put people unnecessarily at risk for illness and death.
Medical acidents and mistakes kill 400,000 people a year, ranking behind only heart disease and cancer as the leading cause of death, Dr. David Lawrence, Kaiser's chief executive, told the National Press Club. Mistakes alone, he said, kill more people each year than tobacco, alcohol,firearms or automobiles.
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If this figure is correct and based on a reported figure of 35,000 deaths per year being blamed on firearms. My calculation indicates that 11.428% of the deaths are receiving 100% of the attention. Further break down of the firearms deaths would show a much different story since all firearms deaths are grouped together it certainly gives a skewed perspective.
Do not forget that among the biggest proponents of more gun control has been the American Medical Association and the Centers for Disease Control. Not only is justice apparently blind, so are the medical authorities.
While the president calls for more gun control in violation of the 2nd Amendment, he fails to recognize the biggest killing mechanisms where there is no protection. Apparently the Justice Department is too busy pursuing the gun owners to prosecute the real dangers.
Perhaps this this is why the medical history questionaires ask if you own a gun?

I will just throw this on the table for discussion and comment.
 
Two or three years ago, the New England Journal of Medicine had an article on "wrongful deaths" in hospitals, alleging some 300,000 or so per year. So, some independent verification.

Be careful about the "35,000" gun deaths. The Center for Disease Control states that there were 14,037 firearms homicides in 1996, down from 18,253 in 1993. This includes justifiable homicides such as self-defense.

There were some 30,000 suicides by all methods, including firearms, in 1996, per the CDC. For around a half-century, to my knowledge, psychologists have generally agreed that for a person bent on suicide, the absence of one particular method--such as gun-availability--is of no consequence...

It's worthwhile to hunt up the CDC Website, for all manner of mortality numbers. I have used http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/osp/usmort.htm

Regards, Art
 
You mean that all this time America has been venting its rage on the "Gun Lobby" when it should have been keeping a wary eye on the "Medical Lobby"?
And I don't mean the area you find yourself in when you enter a hospital.
Maybe we need to register stethoscopes or permit only one hypodermic needle purchase per month.
And while we're at it, we need to find some way of closing that "take some aspirin and call me in the morning" loophole!
 
Doctors have a lot of money and an incredibly strong lobbying organization that makes the NRA look like nothing. Only the AARP is stronger.

Don't look for any legislation or blame directed at this problem, even if they kill a million.

I wonder if this includes the number of people who die every year as a direct result of prescription drugs (overdoses, bad reactions, people taking conflicting drugs, etc.) which is, conservatively, 12,000 or so folks (read that in Time or Newsweek once and it struck me that prescriptions kill about as many people as handguns).

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"Put a rifle in the hands of a Subject, and he immediately becomes a Citizen." -- Jeff Cooper
 
I am not sure which year it was recently, but in like '93 or '94 there were over 140,000 people who died in hospitals from infections they got AFTER THEY WERE ADMITTED INTO THE HOSPITOL. There has been a stink lately about medical nurses not washing their hands enough. Anyway, the point is not to bash nurses or medical staff, but just to put things into perspective. The 14,000 gun deaths (many of them justifiable, including police shootings and self defense shootings) look rather meager.

thaddeus
 
If I'm not mistaken, the term the medicos use is "iatrogenic" when the death is ascribed to hospital/doctor error.

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Vigilantibus et non dormientibus jura subveniunt
 
Iatrogenic, nosocomial, malpractice, incompetetence,mistakes, euthanasia or abortions. It makes little difference what terminology is applied they are still deaths, it could generally be considered as such:
Iatrogenic=the bad guy died when he realized his blunder confronting an armed citizen in the wrong environment.
Nosocomial=acquired after admission to a pending felony crime scene, the felon inadvertently acquires lead poisoning when the intended victim refuses to be a victim.
Malpractice=the dumb SOB didn't realize the citizenry was armed before the fact.
Incompetence=intended victim fails to preform double tap procedure and the felon survives.
Mistakes=used a FMJ 9mm instead of the expanding type and felon survives to file suit.
Euthanasia=pulling a gun to harm another, when on the firing range. Recent example of this in California, otherwise know as suicide maneuver.
Abortion=late term procedure being preformed on the law abiding citizens of this country by the elected politicians in response to an emotional appeal by the vast left wing conspiracy.
It makes no difference whether these terms are used by the medical community or the gun owners. We, the gunowners, seem to be the only ones doing the suffering and feeling the pain.
No you cannot blame the entire medical community any more than the gun owners, what is important to note is that a minority in each category are smearing the majority.
I am a member of both communities, so I do speak with some knowledge of both.
 
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