The unfortunate truth about medical errors is that they
plague the poor and uninsured, reflecting the great medical inequality in
our country. For those who do not consider medical errors to be a problem,
consider this: medical errors kill between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans every
year. This reflects the fact that medical errors kill more people per year
than breast cancer, AIDS, or motor vehicle accidents. Doctors complain of
inflated medical malpractice insurace costs, but medication-related errors
for hospitalized patients cost around $2 billion annually.
The 41 million uninsured Americans exhibit consistently
worse clinical outcomes than insured patients with the same maladies and are
at increased risk for dying prematurely. Only 55% of patients in a recent
random sample of adults received recommended care in treatments and
preventative treatments, and the lag between the discovery of a new medicine
and its adoption by doctors is 17 years. You could suffer from an ailment
and not receive the proper treatment simply because your doctor is not well
educated about treatments that were invented almost two decades ago!
The problem is not restricted to administering too little medication.
Every year millions of people are unnecessarily hospitalized. Using
excessive, unnecessary antibiotics to kill infections outright is a
widespread practice that, while curing individual patients, cause strains of
a disease to mutate and grow stronger, resulting in more serious infections
for the entire population. In 1993, excessive antibiotics were prescribed in
20 million cases, and by now that number has multiplied.
Adverse drug reactions, procedural errors, and nosocomial infections are
all aspects of medical error. Surveys have found that medical error is the
norm in many instances. Medical error actually occurs in the majority of
patients suffering from diabetes, hypertension, tobacco addiction,
hyperlipidemia, congestive heart failure, asthma, depression, and atrial
fibrillation. If you have any reason to believe that your doctors have
administered an inappropriate treatment, prescribed unnecessary
hospitalization, or otherwise jeopardized your wellbeing, consult a lawyer
right away.
If you have more questions, contact a
medical error attorney or read about other
medical malpractice cases at
http://www.hugesettlements.com. If you use this article, please include
these links.
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