Are these numbers accurate :s
It’s even crazier with the amount of money we throw at the healthcare industry too.
It is way higher than most people realize. The problem is that errors in treatment won’t ever get recorded as a cause of death. There are so many legal issues and stuff at work, sighting and figuring out ways to prevent them is about impossible.
Consider this, with all of our modern knowledge on health and diet, and all our medical interventions, adult life expectancy hasn’t changed much since the early 1800s. In terms of actually adding years to a person?s life, all we have been able to do is help people survive childhood.
Funny. I just submitted an essay on patient safety to the foundation of one of the watchdog physicians cited in that article…
There’s been a lot of talk of trying to move medicine towards the direction of aerospace as far as error reduction. I think there’s certainly a lot that can still be done. But medicine is inevitably an imperfect system, and there are a lot of moving parts. If you’ve ever stayed in a hospital you’d know. There are layers of doctors in your care, nurses, techs, physical therapists, pharmacists, nutrititionists, etc. Obviously not everyone is on their A game, and certainly for a lot of hospital personnel, it’s just a job where they just punch their time card. There’s the inevitable damage done by being in a hospital as far as deconditioning and altered schedule. When a patient comes into the hospital, for liability reasons, we regulate and measure everything, from the food they eat and how often they’re pooping, to how far they have to walk. My personal belief is that a lot of error comes from control over things that people otherwise would never care about.
I don’t know where I’m going with this.
- Moving parts. Lots of moving parts.
- The hospital catches the blame for anything that happens inside the hospital, so they regulate a lot of things that I think have an adverse affect on patients.
- Flying airplanes will always be safer than staying in the hospital.
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
Consider this, with all of our modern knowledge on health and diet, and all our medical interventions, adult life expectancy hasn’t changed much since the early 1800s. In terms of actually adding years to a person?s life, all we have been able to do is help people survive childhood.[/quote]
Dude, are you for real? Where did you get those figures? I would like to see your sources.
I can’t imagine, that stuff like implantable pace maker or coronary angiography haven’t added years to a patient’s life. In 1800s you died, when you got cardiac arrhythmia. Today, those affected people are living long enough to die from cancer in their 80s or 90s.
In 1850, an 80 year old could expect to live to 86. In 2004, an 80 year old could expect to live to 88.
The interesting part of the chart is actually from 20 - 40.
[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:
The interesting part of the chart is actually from 20 - 40.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html[/quote]
Which is why DoubleDuce is wrong.
The average life expectancy, as given in that chart, in the 19th/early 20th century is 60-70. It is now 70-80.
this killed my father at the VA Hospital in Little Rock. wayyy to much blood thinner resulted in total organ failure.
even if I didn’t have insurance I would never set foot inside a VA again.
This drug was wrongly prescribed to a family member and led to this syndrome which killed him very quickly. If a family member is on gout medication make sure you check the effects.
Syndrome: Stevens–Johnson syndrome - Wikipedia
[quote]magick wrote:
[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:
The interesting part of the chart is actually from 20 - 40.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html[/quote]
Which is why DoubleDuce is wrong.
The average life expectancy, as given in that chart, in the 19th/early 20th century is 60-70. It is now 70-80.
[/quote]
It depends on how you break down the numbers and what you consider a big increase. It’s something like 10 years different overall. When you are talking about Medicine, EMS, and modern nutrition, that seems pretty small to me.
You can’t just say, “Well I have this anecdote about someone needing X drug and they suffered a side effect, so medicine is bad.” Stevens-Johnson is bad and is one of very few dermatologic/rheumatologic emergencies.
On the other hand, allopurinol is basically the only drug out there that reliably reduces uric acid in the blood stream, which is the only way of preventing gout. Uncontrolled gout is ridiculously painful and can lead to tophaceous deposition.
I met a patient who had no use of his entire right arm because he hadn’t been appropriately treated and all his joints had degraded. One of the uric acid deposits in his toe eroded through his skin and caused an infection of the bone. Odds were that he was gonna have to lose that foot. Allopurinol keeps many people from having their gout progress to these sort of situations.
So you tell me, given a known disease progression, would you risk the odds of a serious side effect?
[quote]Andy63477 wrote:
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
Consider this, with all of our modern knowledge on health and diet, and all our medical interventions, adult life expectancy hasn’t changed much since the early 1800s. In terms of actually adding years to a person?s life, all we have been able to do is help people survive childhood.[/quote]
Dude, are you for real? Where did you get those figures? I would like to see your sources.
I can’t imagine, that stuff like implantable pace maker or coronary angiography haven’t added years to a patient’s life. In 1800s you died, when you got cardiac arrhythmia. Today, those affected people are living long enough to die from cancer in their 80s or 90s.[/quote]
This goes exactly to my point. It is undeniable that medicine saves these people. Which is why you should ask why life expectancy numbers now, that doesn’t mean medicine is necessarily killing as many people as it helps, but what is the real reason? I mean, just from EMS care I’d expect more than that.
Open heart surgery saves tons of people from heart attacks, but heart disease kills as many people as ever.
General health, auto accidents, chemical exposure, symptom treatment est.?
Or maybe we just aren’t as successful as we think. Look at CPR. We all know it. We’ve all seen movies where they do it and the person wakes up. Fact is, that’s REALLY rare. CPR saves very very few people. Even fewer if you look for full recovery.
It’d be interesting to see adult life expectancy without accidental death.
What? 10 years is not that much? Are you serious? Please tell me you’re joking.
Ok. How about this. My mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer two years ago. She should have died sometime in the next 5-6 years if modern cancer medicine didn’t exist. She is now going to (hopefully) live for the next 40 or so years without the cancer ever rearing its ugly head. And, even if it did, there is hope that it can be treated again.
I feel that I am indebted to western medicine and its continued advancement for nothing else than that reason for the rest of my life, especially since I know cancer research didn’t start developing effective (in that it won’t kill you) treatments until the last 20 or so years…
If that was my grandmother with ovarian cancer 20 years ago, she would be dead.
You’re right. Average life expectancy increases don’t show the full picture. Anything closer to the full picture would show that modern medicine has saved so many more than most people can even possibly begin to imagine.
Don’t even get me started on antibiotics and immunization, and my great hatred for the idiots who refuse to get their children immunized.
I believe I said to check the side effects especially since all his skin fell off his body. I never said do not use.
I recall Nassim Taleb argued that if the world quite smoking all the lives saved by modern medicine would be a fraction of the lives saved by people just quitting smoking.
Tobacco related death toll per year according to CDC: 5 million
Diabetes related death toll per year according to WHO: 4 miliion
You said it was wrongly prescribed. Did your family member have gout? If yes, then allopurinol is the first line medication to control uric acid levels. What happened is unfortunate and doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.
I don’t comment on T-Nation often, but your set of posts on “medicine does bad stuff” really grinds my gears. The system is certainly not beyond reproach. But I think it’s silly to think that because all health outcomes aren’t amazing, everyone’s been somehow wronged by the way medicine is doing things.
Regarding CPR… It rarely works, but sometimes it does work. If you have a cardiac arrest and no one does anything, you’re dead. If you have a cardiac arrest and someone knows how to do compressions, there’s a 95% chance you’re gonna die. That’s a free 5% for someone wailing on your chest. If you don’t think that’s worth it, have a directive written up. If you think it’s worth it than don’t. For what it’s worth, if I’m 85 and I code, I want to ride off into the sunset without any broken ribs.
[quote]nickj_777 wrote:
I recall Nassim Taleb argued that if the world quite smoking all the lives saved by modern medicine would be a fraction of the lives saved by people just quitting smoking.
Tobacco related death toll per year according to CDC: 5 million
Diabetes related death toll per year according to WHO: 4 miliion
[/quote]
That’s not a fair argument. Medicine can’t make people quit smoking. It can treat lung, mouth, esophageal etc. cancers after you’ve been smoking. I’m only a medical student, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked with a patient about lifestyle change. Medicine as an institution believes in prevention. It can show patients the door, but it can’t make them walk through it.
Personally, I believe our generation is going to have a weird dichotomy of health. Health habits are so well known now. There are going to be people getting into their 50’s and 60’s who’ve been exercising and eating right their entire lives and people who’ve been doing all the wrong things the entire time. It’s going to be interesting how these groups separate out over the next few decades.
My GF had her appendicitis misdiagnosed three times as nothing more than gastro despite intuition suggesting otherwise. We were almost screaming at the doctor the second and third time before finally being referred to the hospital. Took two or three surgeries over three weeks to remove residual toxins before the hospital gave the all clear to send her home. Inexcusably moronic mistake by the GP.
Yes he had gout.
My point was the medical field and those occupying the field are not beyond reproach. Numerous psychological studies done by Kahneman, Tversky and Tetlock show expert bias and the hubris of individuals because of their education and/or their credentials. My point is much like that of Atul Gawande that medicine is practiced by humans who are fallible and until we realize we are fallible and use system 2 based thinking than our inability to be humble often leads us astray.
I am not of the Gary Klein camp where our intuition is gold. We have so many errors and systematic biases in what we do that it leads to recklessness. I do not care if you hurt yourself but once you hurt another it is different.
Everyone is not wronged by how medicine does things. Medicine isn’t the problem human error is. There is so much documentation that if medical professionals just washed their hands that complications could dramatically increase.
[quote]XiaoNio wrote:
You can’t just say, “Well I have this anecdote about someone needing X drug and they suffered a side effect, so medicine is bad.” Stevens-Johnson is bad and is one of very few dermatologic/rheumatologic emergencies.
On the other hand, allopurinol is basically the only drug out there that reliably reduces uric acid in the blood stream, which is the only way of preventing gout. Uncontrolled gout is ridiculously painful and can lead to tophaceous deposition.
I met a patient who had no use of his entire right arm because he hadn’t been appropriately treated and all his joints had degraded. One of the uric acid deposits in his toe eroded through his skin and caused an infection of the bone. Odds were that he was gonna have to lose that foot. Allopurinol keeps many people from having their gout progress to these sort of situations.
So you tell me, given a known disease progression, would you risk the odds of a serious side effect?[/quote]
If this is directed at me, I think I’m being misread. I’m just posing a question. I’m not bad mouthing medicine. I’m a low level licensed EMS provider myself. I know a lot of hard work has gone into medicine. I also know that medicine can do some amazing things. I’m just saying if you step back and look at the overall numbers for health and longevity, I’m not that impressed. Consider that life expectancy in the US has even dropped recently.