Thursday, October 05, 2006

Medical errors

Here's an article from Mercola.com:


Hospital Errors Fatal to Indiana Babies

Six premature babies at Indiana's Methodist Hospital received an accidental overdose of the anti-clotting drug heparin. Three have already died.
Premature newborns are often given heparin so that they can be given fluids intravenously.
But each of the six infants was given an adult dose, roughly 1,000 times greater than the amount that should be used on infants.
Clarian Health Partners, which runs Methodist Hospital, is planning to start requiring that all drugs be double and triple checked before they are administered. The hospital has offered to pay for funeral expenses, counseling, and restitution to all six families affected. Some of the families involved are planning legal action.
USA Today September 20, 2006

Dr. Mercola's Comment:
I suspect you won't question why the United States leads the world in medical errors any more after reading this tragic story about these needless deaths.
Medical errors like these are a classic example of why the conventional medical paradigm is fatally flawed. You know the system needs changing when the majority of health care workers observe mistakes made by their peers but rarely do anything to challenge them.
Death rates actually decrease when doctors go on strike, and deaths blamed on mistakes made with prescription drugs sold at pharmacies spike at the beginning of each month.
Meanwhile, clever manipulation of the official government death rates conceals the fact that the conventional medical system, not heart disease or cancer, is the leading cause of death in this country.
The United States is spending literally trillions of dollars every year for a system that obsesses with reducing symptoms while failing to address the underlying cause of disease. Unsurprisingly, our return on this investment is profoundly poor. The bottom line is that the system is crumbling before your eyes.

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