Institutionalized Quackery in the Social Imagination...

dishonest practices and claims and or to have special knowledge and skill in some field, typically medicine

 Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the U.S. Their figure, published May 3 in The BMJ, surpasses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) third leading cause of death — respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year [before cv one niner].

The Johns Hopkins team says the CDC’s way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate. The researchers are advocating for updated criteria for classifying deaths on death certificates.

“Incidence rates for deaths directly attributable to medical care gone awry haven’t been recognized in any standardized method for collecting national statistics,” says Martin Makary, M.D., M.P.H., professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an authority on health reform. “The medical coding system was designed to maximize billing for physician services, not to collect national health statistics, as it is currently being used.”

Again, coming from another source, according to a recent study by Johns Hopkins, more than 250,000 people in the United States die every year because of medical mistakes, making it the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.

Other studies report much higher figures, claiming the number of deaths from medical error to be as high as 440,000. The reason for the discrepancy is that physicians, funeral directors, coroners and medical examiners rarely note on death certificates the human errors and system failures involved. Yet death certificates are what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rely on to post statistics for deaths nationwide.

The authors of the Johns Hopkins study, led by Dr. Martin Makary of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, have appealed to the CDC to change the way in which it collects data from death certificates. To date, no changes have been made, Makary said.

Makary defines a death due to medical error as one that is caused by inadequately skilled staff, error in judgment or care, a system defect or a preventable adverse effect. This includes computer breakdowns, mix-ups with the doses or types of medications administered to patients and surgical complications that go undiagnosed.

“Currently the CDC uses a deaths collection system that only tallies causes of death occurring from diseases, morbid conditions, and injuries,” Makary stated in a letter urging the CDC to change the way it collects the nation’s vital health statistics.

“It’s the system more than the individuals that is to blame,” Makary said. The U.S. patient-care study, which was released in 2016, explored death-rate data for eight consecutive years. The researchers discovered that based on a total of 35,416,020 hospitalizations, there was a pooled incidence rate of 251,454 deaths per year — or about 9.5 percent of all deaths — that stemmed from medical error. So, just maybe cv one niner data is mixed up in that somewhere... right? 

What does this all mean or have to do with the social imagination? Everything! It has everything do with the social imagination because therein/at we must find agreement or what Charles H. Cooley would call - common among us. Agreement in the social imagination is the essence of social reality. It is essential in the social imagination; even, if it means agreeing to disagree or agreeing because without agreement there is nothing to go on... and if going on is the goal, could we be going on misinformation producing agreement that has no basis for reality? Yes.

 

*Online Sources ~  https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_suggests_medical_errors_now_third and https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death-in-america.html