Casey Means on medical error: what the evidence says · JRE #2210
SUBJECT: MEDICAL ERROR
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
You know, and Marty McCurry talks about this, like I certainly didn't learn that medical error and medication is the third leading cause of death in the United States.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The claim traces to a widely cited 2016 BMJ analysis by Martin Makary (referenced as Marty McCurry) and Michael Daniel of Johns Hopkins, which estimated more than 250,000 US deaths per year from medical error, a figure that would rank third behind heart disease and cancer. That estimate was derived by extrapolating preventability rates from a handful of older studies onto 2013 hospitalization totals, with no formal meta-analysis, and the difficulty of judging whether an adverse event was truly preventable is a recognized weakness. Competing analyses put the number far lower: a British study cited by AHRQ found only about 3.6 percent of inpatient deaths were potentially avoidable, translating to roughly 26,000 US preventable deaths per year, an order of magnitude below the 250,000 figure. The CDC has not adopted medical error as a death-certificate category or ranked it as the third leading cause. The underlying paper is real and influential, but its headline ranking is one of the most contested statistics in health-system research rather than an established fact.