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MEDICAL ERROR
Therapeutic drug use (not illicit drug use) each year; kills as many as 198,815 people, puts 8.8 million people in hospitals, accounts for 28% of all hospital admissions, and costs as much as $182 billion dollars. 4. The Lancet states that medication-error deaths are rising and reports that one out of every 131 outpatient deaths were caused by medication error and goes on to state that "patients must understand that and be warned about the potential dangers of prescription drugs." 11. Medical malpractice is the 3rd leading cause of preventable death in the United States. Malpractice is responsible for the deaths of 80,000 people annually, one every 7 minutes. This does not include iatrogenic injury. 2. 180,000 people die each year partly as a result of iatrogenic injury. The equivalent of
three jumbo jet crashes every 2 days. Of 1,047 patients during the study. Adverse events were identified by
healthcare personnel in 480 patients, of which 185 resulted in serious complications
ranging from temporary disability to death. "Only about 15% of all medical interventions are supported by scientific evidence. This is partly because only 1% of the articles written in medical journals are scientifically sound." D. Eddy, M.D., Ph.D. 1. Drug errors not only increase costs, but also significantly prolong hospital stays and increase the risk of death almost 2-fold. 7. Preventable drug-related morbidity and mortality was estimated to cost $76.6 billion in the ambulatory setting in the United States. The largest component of this total cost was associated with drug-related hospitalizations. The estimated cost ranged from a conservative estimate of $30.1 to $136.8 billion in a worst-case scenario. 9. We estimated that the annual additional costs associated with preventable [adverse drug events] were $2.8 million and that the costs associated with all [adverse drug events] were $5.6 million. 6. Several easily identifiable factors are associated with a large proportion of medical prescribing errors. Factors commonly associated with errors in prescribing medications were inadequate knowledge or use of knowledge regarding drug therapy; presence of important patient factors related to drug therapy such as age, impaired renal function, and drug allergy; the need for calculation of drug doses; and specialized dosage formulation characteristics and medication prescribing nomenclature. Adverse drug events in hospitalized patients are "...countable, dangerous and evaluable events, not just a collection of unhappy accidents that strike, like cosmic rays, in ways that we cannot predict or understand. In an era of constrained resources, it is vital to remember that [drug errors] in hospitals are common, costly and preventable in many cases." 8.
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© 1996-2003 Craig M. Anderson, D.C.
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We estimated that in 1994 overall 2,216,000 hospitalized patients had
serious adverse drug reactions. Serious adverse drug reactions were defined as those
that resulted in death, were permanently disabling, or required hospitalization. We
estimated that 106,000 had fatal adverse drug reactions, making these reactions between
the fourth and sixth leading cause of death. We excluded errors in drug administration,
noncompliance, overdose, drug abuse, therapeutic failures, and possible adverse
drug reactions. The incidence of serious and fatal adverse drug reactions in U.S.
hospitals was found to be extremely high! According to author Bruce H. Pomeranz, only 156
death certificates showed deaths due to drug reactions. Even when the cause is known to be
a drug, that is rarely recorded on the death certificate. A certificate might list a
stomach hemorrhage as the cause of death, without mentioning the use of the drug that
brought it on. 
