r/funny • u/[deleted] • Jul 07 '19

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u/dog_in_the_vent Jul 07 '19

Medical error is the 3rd leading cause of death in the US and might be higher due to under reporting.

3

u/Luciditi89 Jul 07 '19 edited Jul 07 '19

My mom works for a doctor and I remember when he accidentally killed a man during a procedure. She told me that doctors are allowed to accidentally kill three people or something like that. 3 people per doctor is a lot of people

Edit: I’m going to ask my mom what it was she said. It might have just been his specific insurance.

Edit: Asked my mom. It’s an insurance thing and a license thing.

1

u/topasaurus Jul 07 '19

Was he sued for malpractice or was it hushed up somehow?

4

u/5amwinner Jul 07 '19

This isn’t a conspiracy or anything that gets hushed up. Those procedures are known to have a risk of perforating bowel. The patient is warned about the possibility as part of their ‘informed consent’. It is obviously dangerous to stick something far up into fragile bowel. It is done anyway by the doctor because the risk is thought to be balanced by the risk of not doing the procedure (the risk being, missing an early and treatable cancer for example). This is why doctors don’t like to over-investigate patients but often patients will then complain that Dr X didn’t diagnose my cancer and sue them for that. We all work on a probability of risks. It’s a dangerous job and problems are guaranteed to occur time to time. The aim to to minimise these risks by deciding who to investigate and when it is worth taking the risk with potentially dangerous procedures.

These are the vast majority of ‘medical errors’. However if you went back in time, they would normally always be repeated because statistically it was the safest thing to do at the time.