My takeaway from that article are these important criticisms:
- Correlation is not causation: A medical error, followed by a death does not implies medical error caused death
- The study that claim is based (BMJ analysis), suggest that 62% of US hospital deaths are caused by medical errors. Which seems hard to believe, especially having similar studies instead suggesting a 3.6% in UK, 4.6% in Norway, and 5% in a meta study
- Experts do not agree which facts are medical errors
Most (All?) other claims were about high uncertainty. Small Ns and possible biases in the samples, many obvious and others even irrelevant criticisms
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There's still a lot of uncertainty, even in the criticisms.
I think they could have easily made estimations with the UK, Norway and meta study hospital data to have a minimum estimate of medical errors to counter BMJ analysis with a more reasonable number.
We really should calculate more and talk less (I am already sinning with this comment --_(=/)_--)
