Cranking the Statistics

[Guy B. Meredith]

Has this one made the rounds yet?

Some Startling Statistics...

Number of physicians in the U.S.
700,000

Accidental deaths caused by physicians per year
120,000

Accidental deaths per physician
0.171

Number of gun owners in the U.S.
80,000,000

Number of accidental gun deaths per year (all age groups)
1,500

Accidental deaths per gun owner
0.0000188

Therefore, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.

Taken from the Benton County News Tribune
on the seventeenth of November, 1999

 

[Coinneach]

Yeah, about eleventy-gazillion (tm WalterGA-II) times. Still good ammo for debating bigots.

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"If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance."
-- Samuel Johnson

 

[Art Eatman]

According to the "New England Journal of Medicine", a couple of years back, the death toll in hospitals from "misadventure" (MDs' wrong diagnoses, nurses forgetting medicine or giving wrong medicine or wrong dose, etc.) is around 300,000 per year.

Along this line--may be Urban Legend--the latest "Darwin Awards" mentioned a variant: A South African hospital was losing one ICU patient in one particular room, every Friday. It turned out that the janitress would come in with her floor polisher, unplug the life-support apparatus, plug in the polisher...You get the picture...

, Art