Duty to Warn
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Definition of an “iatrogenic” disorder: A disorder inadvertently induced by a health caregiver because of a surgical, medical, drug or vaccine treatment or by a diagnostic procedure.
In last week’s column I wrote that iatrogenic disorders (a doctor-, drug-, vaccine-, surgery- or other medical treatment-caused disorder) were the third leading cause of death in the US. That revelation may have ruffled the feathers of some readers, particularly if they were employed in the medical professions, so I am enlarging on that statement in this week’s column.
In 2000, a commentary article was written by Dr Barbara Stanfield, MD, MPH. It was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA, July 26, 2000—Vol 284, No. 4).
The article was titled “Is US Health Really the Best in the World? It has been posted at https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/192908?redirect=true.
In the article, Stanfield included the following statistics from her research about iatrogenic deaths. (Note: these numbers do not include out-patient iatrogenic deaths):
- 12,000 deaths/year from unnecessary surgery in hospitals
• 7,000 deaths/year from medication errors in hospitals
• 20,000 deaths/year from other errors in hospitals
• 80,000 deaths/year from nosocomial infections in hospitals
• 106,000 deaths/year from non-error, adverse effects of medications in hospitals
Combining these five groups gives us a total of 225,000 in-patient deaths. The 225,000 number does not include out-patient deaths or disabilities. In any case, this number easily constitutes the third leading cause of death in the United States, behind heart disease and cancer (see the official list for 2015 below).
The CDC’s Mortality and Morbidity Report for 2000, said that cancer caused 710,701 US deaths in 2000 and heart disease caused 553,080. For comparison purposes, the CDC’s report said that heart disease caused 606,401 deaths in 2017 and cancer caused 594,707.
Below are the US death statistics for 2015 (apparently the last year that the CDC has published the complete list). More