How Many Die from Medical Mistakes

Off Topic
41

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]Andy63477 wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[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.[/quote]

It’s not really fair to compare the whole population. Heathly people nowerdays don’t greatly benefit from medical advances, because they simply don’t rely on it. When you exclude this cohort, the difference in life expectancy would be significant higher.

On the other hand people may see our medical knowledge as a free pass to lead a sedentary life style. People getting overweight, eating shit all day long, because there are pills to “fix” the high pressure, portable oxgen tank, when you want to smoke with just a quarter of a lung left.

In medical context an increased life expectancy of 10 years is very much. Can you imagine, how much money is spent on research just to prolong the survival rate for a couple of months? The great health discoveries have been made (like sanitation), now the rewards are pretty small.

But I agree with you, that EMS and especially intensive care is often “over the top”. But wouldn’t you want, that anything possible would be tried, if something bad happened to your loved ones?

A physician told me once, a pill without any side effect also doesn’t have any desired effect. The same goes for the whole medical system. [/quote]

You could look at it without things like accidental death too.

But 10 years considering going from the 1800s where people starved to death and took mercury as medicine while bleeding you and in a place without ambulances and even basic first aid knowledge. It’s not insignificant, it’s just disappointing in my eyes. And remember, life expectancy in the US has been DECREASING.[/quote]

Sorry, no.

See page 5 figure 4. Even allowing for improved infant survivorship, the percentage of people surviving at any age has been improving for a century or so.

Or check out the most recent decades:

42

[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]Andy63477 wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[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.[/quote]

It’s not really fair to compare the whole population. Heathly people nowerdays don’t greatly benefit from medical advances, because they simply don’t rely on it. When you exclude this cohort, the difference in life expectancy would be significant higher.

On the other hand people may see our medical knowledge as a free pass to lead a sedentary life style. People getting overweight, eating shit all day long, because there are pills to “fix” the high pressure, portable oxgen tank, when you want to smoke with just a quarter of a lung left.

In medical context an increased life expectancy of 10 years is very much. Can you imagine, how much money is spent on research just to prolong the survival rate for a couple of months? The great health discoveries have been made (like sanitation), now the rewards are pretty small.

But I agree with you, that EMS and especially intensive care is often “over the top”. But wouldn’t you want, that anything possible would be tried, if something bad happened to your loved ones?

A physician told me once, a pill without any side effect also doesn’t have any desired effect. The same goes for the whole medical system. [/quote]

You could look at it without things like accidental death too.

But 10 years considering going from the 1800s where people starved to death and took mercury as medicine while bleeding you and in a place without ambulances and even basic first aid knowledge. It’s not insignificant, it’s just disappointing in my eyes. And remember, life expectancy in the US has been DECREASING.[/quote]

Sorry, no.

See page 5 figure 4. Even allowing for improved infant survivorship, the percentage of people surviving at any age has been improving for a century or so.

Or check out the most recent decades:
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/history-of-life-expectancy[/quote]

That only goes to 2011. Several studies have specifically cited at least women dying at higher rates for age in 2013. And it apparently isn’t just a US trend either.

43

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]Andy63477 wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[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.[/quote]

It’s not really fair to compare the whole population. Heathly people nowerdays don’t greatly benefit from medical advances, because they simply don’t rely on it. When you exclude this cohort, the difference in life expectancy would be significant higher.

On the other hand people may see our medical knowledge as a free pass to lead a sedentary life style. People getting overweight, eating shit all day long, because there are pills to “fix” the high pressure, portable oxgen tank, when you want to smoke with just a quarter of a lung left.

In medical context an increased life expectancy of 10 years is very much. Can you imagine, how much money is spent on research just to prolong the survival rate for a couple of months? The great health discoveries have been made (like sanitation), now the rewards are pretty small.

But I agree with you, that EMS and especially intensive care is often “over the top”. But wouldn’t you want, that anything possible would be tried, if something bad happened to your loved ones?

A physician told me once, a pill without any side effect also doesn’t have any desired effect. The same goes for the whole medical system. [/quote]

You could look at it without things like accidental death too.

But 10 years considering going from the 1800s where people starved to death and took mercury as medicine while bleeding you and in a place without ambulances and even basic first aid knowledge. It’s not insignificant, it’s just disappointing in my eyes. And remember, life expectancy in the US has been DECREASING.[/quote]

Sorry, no.

See page 5 figure 4. Even allowing for improved infant survivorship, the percentage of people surviving at any age has been improving for a century or so.

Or check out the most recent decades:
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/history-of-life-expectancy[/quote]

That only goes to 2011. Several studies have specifically cited at least women dying at higher rates for age in 2013. And it apparently isn’t just a US trend either. [/quote]

Ok, then. Show me.
I posted the most recent data front the CDC which is up-to-date as of 2011. There is no more recent data at the CDC.

I doubt your assertion that there has been a turn around, suddenly, in female mortality between 2011 and 2013. Please provide the citation.

In the meantime, look again at that table:

It is remarkable that in the last decades of life, between 2000 and 2004, there has been an “average” gain in life expectancy on the order of 0.7 years. Allowing for skewness, that is impressive.
I know for a fact that in the US since 2002-2003, there has been a drop in mortality due to breast cancer specifically.

So, respectfully, where did you get that assertion about a decrease in life expectancy for women specifically in 2013?

44

Skeptix I know you’re an MD by why the fuck should we listen to you over cited medical research? Are you even published? I’ve seen you make pretty bold statements in a lot of threads revolving around medicine and healthcare. You seem overtly politicized. Just an observation.

45

[quote]XiaoNio wrote:

[quote]nickj_777 wrote:
Sir, maybe from your professional experience nothing bad has occurred using the drug. But from my experience someone close to me died taking the drug. Knowledge about side effects is not a bad thing. Sorry if I offended you in anyway. My apologies.[/quote]

And what I said earlier was that said things happen. Understandably, you’re upset about an adverse event. But it’s still frontline therapy for gout. Between taking chances of adverse reaction on the standard of care or enduring a guaranteed painful and progressive disease, what would the choice be?

Medical error is certainly a big deal. But I don’t think this qualifies as an example. It’s certainly also not something that’s shrugged off. Before every procedure, there’s consent and a time out. There are sign offs to deliver medication. You mention handwashing being able to stop hospital acquired infections. I haven’t been in a hospital or clinic that doesn’t have hand sanitizer outside or a sink inside every room.

An example of medical negligence is not following the appropriate guideline when a patient is going septic. It’s giving a steroid when a patient needs antibiotics, or giving antibiotics when a patient needs steroids. Most of these are judgment calls based on clinical picture. They’re soft and variable in real time but often obvious errors in hindsight.

I’m not saying that medical error is not a concern. What I’m saying is that your perception of what’s wrong with medical care isn’t exactly where the big problems lie.[/quote]

Asking for your professional opinion; when prescribing allopurinol should a doctor test for the HLA-B*5801 allele prior to allopurinol dosing ? If the doctor does not test for the allele is he or she taking the proper care to prevent something bad from happening?

46

[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]Andy63477 wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[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.[/quote]

It’s not really fair to compare the whole population. Heathly people nowerdays don’t greatly benefit from medical advances, because they simply don’t rely on it. When you exclude this cohort, the difference in life expectancy would be significant higher.

On the other hand people may see our medical knowledge as a free pass to lead a sedentary life style. People getting overweight, eating shit all day long, because there are pills to “fix” the high pressure, portable oxgen tank, when you want to smoke with just a quarter of a lung left.

In medical context an increased life expectancy of 10 years is very much. Can you imagine, how much money is spent on research just to prolong the survival rate for a couple of months? The great health discoveries have been made (like sanitation), now the rewards are pretty small.

But I agree with you, that EMS and especially intensive care is often “over the top”. But wouldn’t you want, that anything possible would be tried, if something bad happened to your loved ones?

A physician told me once, a pill without any side effect also doesn’t have any desired effect. The same goes for the whole medical system. [/quote]

You could look at it without things like accidental death too.

But 10 years considering going from the 1800s where people starved to death and took mercury as medicine while bleeding you and in a place without ambulances and even basic first aid knowledge. It’s not insignificant, it’s just disappointing in my eyes. And remember, life expectancy in the US has been DECREASING.[/quote]

Sorry, no.

See page 5 figure 4. Even allowing for improved infant survivorship, the percentage of people surviving at any age has been improving for a century or so.

Or check out the most recent decades:
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/history-of-life-expectancy[/quote]

That only goes to 2011. Several studies have specifically cited at least women dying at higher rates for age in 2013. And it apparently isn’t just a US trend either. [/quote]

Ok, then. Show me.
I posted the most recent data front the CDC which is up-to-date as of 2011. There is no more recent data at the CDC.

I doubt your assertion that there has been a turn around, suddenly, in female mortality between 2011 and 2013. Please provide the citation.

In the meantime, look again at that table:

It is remarkable that in the last decades of life, between 2000 and 2004, there has been an “average” gain in life expectancy on the order of 0.7 years. Allowing for skewness, that is impressive.
I know for a fact that in the US since 2002-2003, there has been a drop in mortality due to breast cancer specifically.

So, respectfully, where did you get that assertion about a decrease in life expectancy for women specifically in 2013?
[/quote]

Even for those years, it depends on where you look and who you look at. From 1992 through 2006 about half of US counties saw a decrease in female life expectancy:
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/32/3/451.abstract

And actually going back and finding what I’d read on the subject, the decrease is an extrapolation, not yet hard data. So I’ll admit I jumped the gun on proclaiming an outright decrease in life expectancy, yet (though it may currently be the case, the data isn’t in). However, there are definitely some disturbing downward trends in a large number of areas and in certain demographics. Female life expectancy hasn’t been increasing like male expectancy because almost half the country has their female population dying younger. Even starting as far back as 1992. That isn’t a sudden turn around.

47

This is a popular argument supporting Double Duce Human Lifespans Nearly Constant for 2,000 Years | Live Science

48

[quote]nickj_777 wrote:
Asking for your professional opinion; when prescribing allopurinol should a doctor test for the HLA-B*5801 allele prior to allopurinol dosing ? If the doctor does not test for the allele is he or she taking the proper care to prevent something bad from happening?[/quote]

Now that is a more interesting question. I think in the future genomic medicine is going to be significantly more important. But at this time it’s cost prohibitive to do so. It’s postulated that eventually everyone will be able to have their genome sequenced and we’ll be able to know all about medication sensitivities and cancer predispositions. But this brings up a whole host of issues.

First, Americans have trust issues. If you knew all about your genetic predispositions, would you feel safe with the information out there? It changes the whole private insurance market. Do people really want to know what their predispositions are going to be? Additionally, more testing doesn’t necessarily equal different outcomes. That’s why mammograms aren’t recommended annually for women in their 40’s anymore. That’s why PSAs and digital rectal exams have fallen out of favor for prostate cancer. The sensitivity and specificity just isn’t there.

I think it’s also important to mention that genetic predisposition isn’t the same as disease. My dad is HLA-B27 positive (so there’s a 50% chance I am too). He had Reiter’s but he’s never had ankylosing spondylitis or psoriatic arthritis. Not everyone with HLA-DR4 ends up with rheumatoid arthritis. Just like HLA-B5801 will end up with Stevens-Johnson if they take allopurinol. Predisposition is just predisposition.

Specific to your question, allopurinol was basically the only available disease modifying drug for gout, so in your specific case there may not have been another option. There’s now Febuxostat as well which works on a slightly different portion of the pathway. It’s new so the side effect profile isn’t well established. There’s some tertiary drugs as well, but they aren’t for continued use.

Anyway, I think the debate on lifespan is misleading. People get old and die no matter what. There’s a lot more factors that interplay in that than just medicine. There’s socioeconomic status, diet and exercise habits, environmental exposures, genetic predispositions, etc. Until you control for those, it’s hard to say what medicine really does for life expectancy. Besides that, there’s really an upper limit to how old people can get before things start going downhill anyway. I don’t think the failure to push life expectancy into the 90’s is indicative of a failure of medicine.

I was once asked by an attending what the historical inaccuracy of most medieval movies was. He was asked this in one of his history classes years ago. The answer is that everyone is always too fit and clean. A lot of injuries and illnesses wouldn’t kill you but you would likely be maimed, have skin infections and some chronic disease of some kind. The body can go a long way no matter what. But quality of life wise, I think we’re doing pretty well.

49

I’ll just jump in to make a few points on both issues. I am certainly no expert but I am a working RN in the Emergency setting at a hospital, and these kind of topics have been an interest to me for the better part of a decade.:

  • There is a MASSIVE difference in Total Lifespan versus Life Expectancy. Humans in good health will generally live to about 80, give or take 5 years. This hasn’t changed much since we started recording it but it has gone up. That is the lifespan of a human. However, to dismiss the amount of people that get to enjoy that lifespan as insignificant is quite unfortunate in my eyes. Life Expectancy has nearly doubled in just the last 100 years, hardly something to sneeze at. To dismiss it as simply “getting people out of childhood” misses the point entirely in my opinion.

  • The “medical related deaths” thing is massively misleading. The main problem being that the hospital and “medicine” get all the blame when someone dies. Well, what would have happened had that person not gone to the hospital? Or not taken the coumadin to thin their blood so they didnt have a stroke? Someone dies on the operating table during the open heart procedure needed to save their life… Another “death by medicine.”

I’m certainly not discounting the actual events that do happen, but (to my memory) the gaping hole in the numbers in these studies is that they do not separate out the people that would have died anyway without the care we have available to them. Obviously a hard number to assess in and of itself, but if thats the case why publish a number at all?

Speaking from in-the-trenches experiences, mistakes are certainly possible and do happen, but given the RIGOROUS standards in place to make sure they do not happen (scanning pt’s wrist bands just prior to admin of meds, scanning the med to make sure it exactly matches the order, “time out” before surgery to make sure its the right person, etc…) I have a VERY hard time believing nearly 100,000 people die directly and only as a result and nearly 500,000 deaths are “contributed to” by improper care, whatever that means (I’m sure it has a very, very broad inclusion criteria)

  • As a side note, Resources are also an issue. In physics we always used to crunch the initial set of numbers using the impossible scenario of a “friction-less surface” … which is how many people think medicine should be practiced. Spare no expense, do everything you can, run all the tests and do them twice just to be sure, run them all STAT, with a second opinion… or I’ll sue for malpractice. Which is a great idea, but thats why everything costs so much and there are 6 month wait times for certain things. This is kind of a side issue, but it is related because there is only so much medicine can do in a period of time.
50

[quote]nickj_777 wrote:
This is a popular argument supporting Double Duce Human Lifespans Nearly Constant for 2,000 Years | Live Science [/quote]

Yes, that is basically what I’m saying. A 40 year life expectancy doesn’t mean what people think it means.

And I’d still like to see numbers with abortion factored in. The most dangerous time for a human life today is probably the womb.

51

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]nickj_777 wrote:
This is a popular argument supporting Double Duce Human Lifespans Nearly Constant for 2,000 Years | Live Science [/quote]

Yes, that is basically what I’m saying. A 40 year life expectancy doesn’t mean what people think it means.

And I’d still like to see numbers with abortion factored in. The most dangerous time for a human life today is probably the womb.[/quote]

Are you talking about elected abortion or spontaneous abortion?

52

[quote]Lonnie123 wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]nickj_777 wrote:
This is a popular argument supporting Double Duce Human Lifespans Nearly Constant for 2,000 Years | Live Science [/quote]

Yes, that is basically what I’m saying. A 40 year life expectancy doesn’t mean what people think it means.

And I’d still like to see numbers with abortion factored in. The most dangerous time for a human life today is probably the womb.[/quote]

Are you talking about elected abortion or spontaneous abortion?[/quote]

Both.

53

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]nickj_777 wrote:
This is a popular argument supporting Double Duce Human Lifespans Nearly Constant for 2,000 Years | Live Science [/quote]

Yes, that is basically what I’m saying. A 40 year life expectancy doesn’t mean what people think it means.

And I’d still like to see numbers with abortion factored in. The most dangerous time for a human life today is probably the womb.[/quote]

Do you think the most dangerous time for a human life depends on geographical area or is this an across the globe argument? I am curious…

54

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]Lonnie123 wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]nickj_777 wrote:
This is a popular argument supporting Double Duce Human Lifespans Nearly Constant for 2,000 Years | Live Science [/quote]

Yes, that is basically what I’m saying. A 40 year life expectancy doesn’t mean what people think it means.

And I’d still like to see numbers with abortion factored in. The most dangerous time for a human life today is probably the womb.[/quote]

Are you talking about elected abortion or spontaneous abortion?[/quote]

Both. [/quote]

Not to turn this into an abortion issue, but I thought this was interesting. At the risk of displaying my own ignorance… I just looked up the abortion rates both stateside and across the globe and the numbers are quite staggering, almost hard to believe honestly.

US performs roughly 1 million a year, and worldwide its nearly 41 million (2003 numbers, which were in the middle of a declining trend, so it is likely lower now but I am not certain of that)

I had NO idea it was anywhere close to 41 million A YEAR.

http://www.numberofabortions.com/ - this site also has sources to its numbers, so I’m only posting this one link instead of all the separate ones.

Back to the issue at hand

55

[quote]XiaoNio wrote:
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.

  1. Moving parts. Lots of moving parts.
  2. 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.
  3. Flying airplanes will always be safer than staying in the hospital.[/quote]

I agree with most of what you said, there is way too many moving pieces and it’s an imperfect science to get everything correct 100% of the time. With this said though careless errors/relying on technology is too high in hospitals IMO.

I have Crohn’s and as a result spend lots of time in hospitals, way more than I would ever care to. In one of my stays I was overdosed with morphine by mistake coming out of surgery. When I was in the recovery room the nurse gave me morphine for the pain, well when they eventually moved me back up to my room my nurses computer started beeping that it was time for my pain meds. Without even double checking the computer, bam I get whacked with another dose of morphine only 15 minutes after my last dose. Being hooked up to an iron lung and given the medicine to expel the morphine from my body was not too terribly fun!

During the same stay I went in for a second surgery and at some point a doctor or nurse stepped on the foot pedal that control the surgical laser and it turned on slicing my pec. Always interesting when you go in for stomach surgery and come out with a ton of staples/glue on your chest!! Thank goodness the laser wasn’t pointed at my neck or I wouldn’t be here to type this rant.

I’m still pissed that this because my bench has never been the same since…

56

[quote]CrewPierce wrote:

[quote]XiaoNio wrote:

I’m still pissed that this because my bench has never been the same since…[/quote]

I burst out laughing at the chest part. There really isn’t anything in the gym like a good chest day.

57

[quote]CrewPierce wrote:Without even double checking the computer, bam I get whacked with another dose of morphine only 15 minutes after my last dose. Being hooked up to an iron lung and given the medicine to expel the morphine from my body was not too terribly fun!
[/quote]

The laser story is pretty scary, this statement strikes me as odd though and needs a bit more detail. I routinely give morphine in the ER so I’m aware of its affects.

Getting “another dose” is meaningless unless we know how many milligrams it was, and what the previous dose was.

Often times those pumps are set, and locked, to give 1mg every 15 minutes… Which is a very low dose. 4mg is considered a “starter dose” in the ER, with 10mg not being uncommon with almost no side affects in an individual that doesnt have a preexisting breathing issue. Certainly no where near the amount needed to put someone on a breathing machine, before which we would just give a reversal agent.

Im curious as to how much they gave you that you ended up on “an iron lung” (Im assuming this means you were intubated and on a ventilator/breathing machine? There is no iron lung anymore, certainly not for this type of episode). Thats such an unusual situation that I have a very hard time believing it was from a single dose of morphine, even if that dose was LARGE and nearly right after another dose.

58

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]Andy63477 wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[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.[/quote]

It’s not really fair to compare the whole population. Heathly people nowerdays don’t greatly benefit from medical advances, because they simply don’t rely on it. When you exclude this cohort, the difference in life expectancy would be significant higher.

On the other hand people may see our medical knowledge as a free pass to lead a sedentary life style. People getting overweight, eating shit all day long, because there are pills to “fix” the high pressure, portable oxgen tank, when you want to smoke with just a quarter of a lung left.

In medical context an increased life expectancy of 10 years is very much. Can you imagine, how much money is spent on research just to prolong the survival rate for a couple of months? The great health discoveries have been made (like sanitation), now the rewards are pretty small.

But I agree with you, that EMS and especially intensive care is often “over the top”. But wouldn’t you want, that anything possible would be tried, if something bad happened to your loved ones?

A physician told me once, a pill without any side effect also doesn’t have any desired effect. The same goes for the whole medical system. [/quote]

You could look at it without things like accidental death too.

But 10 years considering going from the 1800s where people starved to death and took mercury as medicine while bleeding you and in a place without ambulances and even basic first aid knowledge. It’s not insignificant, it’s just disappointing in my eyes. And remember, life expectancy in the US has been DECREASING.[/quote]

Sorry, no.

See page 5 figure 4. Even allowing for improved infant survivorship, the percentage of people surviving at any age has been improving for a century or so.

Or check out the most recent decades:
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/history-of-life-expectancy[/quote]

That only goes to 2011. Several studies have specifically cited at least women dying at higher rates for age in 2013. And it apparently isn’t just a US trend either. [/quote]

Ok, then. Show me.
I posted the most recent data front the CDC which is up-to-date as of 2011. There is no more recent data at the CDC.

I doubt your assertion that there has been a turn around, suddenly, in female mortality between 2011 and 2013. Please provide the citation.

In the meantime, look again at that table:

It is remarkable that in the last decades of life, between 2000 and 2004, there has been an “average” gain in life expectancy on the order of 0.7 years. Allowing for skewness, that is impressive.
I know for a fact that in the US since 2002-2003, there has been a drop in mortality due to breast cancer specifically.

So, respectfully, where did you get that assertion about a decrease in life expectancy for women specifically in 2013?
[/quote]

Even for those years, it depends on where you look and who you look at. From 1992 through 2006 about half of US counties saw a decrease in female life expectancy:
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/32/3/451.abstract

And actually going back and finding what I’d read on the subject, the decrease is an extrapolation, not yet hard data. So I’ll admit I jumped the gun on proclaiming an outright decrease in life expectancy, yet (though it may currently be the case, the data isn’t in). However, there are definitely some disturbing downward trends in a large number of areas and in certain demographics. Female life expectancy hasn’t been increasing like male expectancy because almost half the country has their female population dying younger. Even starting as far back as 1992. That isn’t a sudden turn around.
[/quote]

Well that is an interesting squib, but it does not support the contention that female life expectancy declined suddenly in2013.

Your citation does not give a source. But it is interesting because it is reporting a tautology.
In a perfect bell-shaped curve, each year will have 50% of the counties reporting increases, and 50% reporting decreases, in the life expectancies of women. With skewness, the number may be somewhat different, say, the number reported in your citation.

But the overall statistic is reported in the other chart by the CDC, a report on the aggregate improvement in life-expectancy, in each decade of life, through 2011.
(2012 data won’t be avilable for months, and 2013 data even later, which is why I was skeptical of your assertion.)

59

[quote]Gettnitdone wrote:
Skeptix I know you’re an MD by why the fuck should we listen to you over cited medical research? Are you even published? I’ve seen you make pretty bold statements in a lot of threads revolving around medicine and healthcare. You seem overtly politicized. Just an observation.[/quote]

You are under no obligation whatsoever to listen to me or to read what I write.
It just so happens that I am very familiar with the IOM and subsequent reports, and have reviewed the methodologic criticisms of them. I may actually know more about this subject than the casual reader.

If I share an opinion based on fact, or reviews, does that make me “overtly polticized.” Perhaps; or it may be the case that you simply disagree with me, whatever level of education or interest you may have in the subject at hand. Does that make you “overtly politicized?”
Just an observation.

60

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]nickj_777 wrote:
This is a popular argument supporting Double Duce Human Lifespans Nearly Constant for 2,000 Years | Live Science [/quote]

Yes, that is basically what I’m saying. A 40 year life expectancy doesn’t mean what people think it means.

And I’d still like to see numbers with abortion factored in. The most dangerous time for a human life today is probably the womb.[/quote]

…and that article misses the point. Even when you take out the large contribution of the decline in infant mortality, life expectancy at any age (beyond childhood) has risen over the last hundred or so years.
(view again that CDC graph–percent surviving at a given age over time–I cited above.)