Medicine has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few decades with every week bringing with it a new breakthrough in streamlining the provision of healthcare to patients. These developments now beg the question: Is every death in the hospital a result of medical errors? Can every hospital death today be prevented in the presence of competent medical professionals?
"In the age of modern healthcare, every time a patient dies after a routine operation or procedure, it’s a case of medical error. "
The statement above attempts to propagate the findings by Johns Hopkins’ University that attributed 250,000 deaths per year in the United States of America (USA) to medical errors, effectively making it the 3rd leading cause of death in the country. Proponents of the statement above would argue that the expansions in medical boundaries over the past few decades have meant many causes of operation mortalities in previous years- unsanitary conditions, unreliable equipment, and gap in understanding of human physiology and anatomy- have been eradicated from the field. Furthermore, the fact that the routine procedure has been carried out hundreds of times the same day in the same country and often at the same time without incident only serves to call into question the competence of the medical professionals in charge of the botched operation.
However, what proponents of the argument fail to consider is how current knowledge of medicine is not complete- all the features of human anatomy to be discovered have not been discovered and all the exceptions to medical drugs have not been isolated. The deceased patient may just have been an exception to a routine procedure used with a condition that may never have been known to have caused the reasons for their passing away. Additionally, current medical tests are not fool proof: A rapid PCR test is prone to Alpha I and Alpha II errors and biopsies are infamous for yielding cancerous clues only to turn out to be benign. In such cases, who is to blame for a medical procedure gone wrong? How could the physician or surgeon have known of the patient’s ailments if they are not presented in tests? Finally, patients often distort medical histories by withholding potentially embarrassing information from doctors: a case in point would be when a teenager refuses to admit to drug use and then suffers an allergic reaction because of the prescribed medicine undergoing an adverse reaction on their beings.
To conclude, I believe that blaming medical errors for the death of all patients ignores a huge volume of other reasons out of a physician’s control as discussed above that could have all contributed to the demise of the patient. Only when all the research in the medical field has yielded a definite concrete answer and there are no more questions in the field of medicine left to answer could the statement above be considered true- a possibility that does not seem likely in the near future.
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