Gun Safety Perspective? (And doctors and lawyers)

Re-printed from my post on Piscatorial. ...

Since a lot of you fishermen are also gun owning hunters, and almost everyone has a doctor or more, I thought you might be interested in the following stats. A fisheries biologist working for a NW Indian Tribe has become an e-mail friend of mine, and he just e-mailed this astounding set of statistics to me that compare the safety of guns and doctors. To wit:

Number of physicians in the US: 700,000. Accidental
deaths caused by
> physicians per year: 120,000. Accidental deaths
per physician/year
> 0.171 (statisitics by the U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services).
Number of gun owners
in
> the US: 80,000,000. Number of accidental gun deaths
per year (all
age
> groups): 1,500. Accidental deaths per gun owner:
0.0000188.
> Statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times
more dangerous
than
> gun owners. FACT: Not everyone has a gun, but
everyone has at least
> one Doctor. .........

I have always been agast at reports, and my own observations, of carelessness in the medical profession (in addition to taking a huge amount of Americans income to do this work); but these stats make me want to gag, if they are correct! However, I still think I would be more comfortable with a doctor holding me at surgery knife point than a crazy lowlife hunter or fisherman holding a gun at me. Maybe [img]images/icons/rolleyes.gif[/img]

RT

[ 07-26-2001: Message edited by: RT ]

[jet]

Great stats RT..

I think might just repeate these.


Jet~~~

Jet, remember that these aren't my stats. But I do trust the man who apparently got them from the Dept. of HHS. I repeated these without personally checking into their accuracy, which I probably should have done. I also should have pointed out a significant factor - that it compared "accidental" deaths caused by doctors and guns. It left out intentional deaths by gun shooters. But what stands out at me is the accidents by trained doctors were stats for "deaths", not just all the smaller things they cause (like infections and cripling surgeries). Avoidable deaths! ... As for accuracy, they seem to fit with other things I've heard, they are very angering, and I think they should be known by more of the public in any type of forum; because they simply are unacceptable. I went thru this stuff with my foot surgeries. Recently Jen's son Andrew went thru mis-care with oral surgeons. It does happen a lot. ... If these stats are true, spread the word. Maybe it will help lead to more careful treatment within the overly expensive medical system in this country. These stats should be sent to AMA and hospital administations. Or do they already have them and are to busy counting the bottom line? ...

After that vent, enough politics from me again (for now anyway [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img] ). If too far from BB intent, I don't mind the mods deleting this.

RT

[ 07-25-2001: Message edited by: RT ]

[Killertraylor]

I defend doctors in medical malpractice lawsuits and although I like the idea of the post, I think the numbers are skewed. There is no way 120,000 people accidentally (negligently?) die at the hands of doctors each year. My bet is that there are less than 50 people who are negligently killed by doctors in the entire state of Oregon each year. If there are more, then there are a lot of people who aren't pursuing lawsuits - and I think we all know that's not true. I saw this e-mail for the first time a few months ago - like I said, I like the idea, but I don't think it's accurate. I'd like to know where they got their numbers.

Killer':

You are a mal-practice doctor defense lawyer. I like to have lighthearted debates with lawyers if there is any significant disagreements about an important issue. I don't know that there is here yet, but your post leaves me with some curiousities. You defend against medical mal-practice plaintives and yet you say you like the idea of the first post. That leaves me a bit confused. You also believe the stats of the Dept. of HHS to be skewed. Being a lawyer intimate within this field I would think you would be privy to exactly how these statistics are compiled and of their accuracy and significants. What do you base your skepticism on? And what motive would be there for inaccuracies? That's not to be confrontive toward your post, because I am a little skeptical of that large of statistic myself. Seems this info should be readily available due to the Freedom of Information Act, and accessable on their website if we can find it - there should be one for a Government agency, especially if they are essentially a public medical watchdog entity. ...

A bit bothersome to me could be the perspective of mal-practice defenders. Your's is "My bet is that there are less than 50 people who are negligently killed by doctors in the entire state of Oregon each year. If there are more, then there are a lot of people who aren't pursuing lawsuits ...". I guess that could represent a lot of potential legal fee income not being reaped? And since Oregon has a little less than the average US state population and you bet that there are less than 50 negligently killed medical patients per year in Oregon, for sake of argument let's say that approximately by your estimate there are 50 (states) X 50 (killed) = 2,500 negligently killed medical patients per year in this country. Being involved in this field, do you find that estimate to be acceptable, if accurate? And if the truth lies somewhere in between your approx. estimate (2,500) and the U.S. Gov. compiled statistics (120,000), say around 50,000+ negligently killed medical patients per year in this country, would that be acceptable by your industry's standards? It's certainly not by patient's standards! Or any reasonable measure of standards. That's astonishingly unacceptable! That's my point with this thread. ...

This hits close to home for me, not because of my surgically messed up foot, but over 2 decades ago our close friends/next door neighbors lost their first daughter when a poorly written prescription by the doctor at the hospital was misread by the attending nurse and a very wrong medication was given that killed her quickly. Unacceptable! ...

RT

[ 07-26-2001: Message edited by: RT ]

[sinker]

Good point RT. My wife's neice has Downs. She had several heart surgeries before she was a year old. Doc wrote a prescription for her and they took it into the pharmacist and the pharmacist flipped out.
The doc had prescribed something like 10 times the normal amount given to an adult. It would have killed her instantly.
Look at Jen's kid that keeps leaving the hospital with packing still in him. Happened 4 times now is it?
Docs are a great thing but what's scary is how many out there are incompetent. From what I understand about the only people they have to watch out for is the medical review board of that state.
Doc screws up in one state, he moves to another with a clean slate. Pretty scary.
Just had surgery last month. The info they give you for post-op is not much.

[bajaspecial]

Well, I it took me about 20 minutes to find this information, and still couldn't find the specific numbers mentioned above (except on just about every pro-gun website...do web search and see for yourself!!)...but these are just as bad...if not worse.


ÒErrors in administering drugs may account for up to 140,000 deaths annually, increases length of stay by 2 days, and result in death in 0.3 percent of hospital patients. Up to 70 percent of adverse drug events are preventable by health care interventions such as system-wide quality improvement and patient or physician education.Ó

Page 33 of the PDF file available here: http://www.hhs.gov/of/reports/account/acct97/sect2.pdf

Ò24. The most comprehensive study to date is the Harvard medical practice study that involved the review of about 30,000 randomly selected records of patients hospitalized in New York State during 1984. The study found that 1 percent of the hospitalizations involved adverse events caused by negligence. The study team estimated that during 1984 negligent care provided in New York State hospitals was responsible for 27,179 injuries, including 6,895 deaths and 877 instances of Òpermanent and total disability.ÓÓ

Page 40 of the PDF file available here: http://www.hhs.gov/oig/oei/reports/a521.pdf

[Killertraylor]

RT - I don't generally enjoy debate about legal issues (reminds me of politics - people arguing and never changing the other person's mind) but I said I like the idea of the post because I am a staunch advocate of the 2nd Amendment and the right to bear arms. The numbers, if true, strongly support the people's right to have firearms and help to dispell the firearms scare tactics thrust upon us by the media and their overattention to gun related incidents.

With respect to my work, I'm not concerned about national statistics - they are not admissible in court to prove that Dr. X was or was not negligent and I'd have no reason to search for them, nor would I know how. I based my post on personal experience - our firm is the leading medical malpractice defense firm in the state and we see hundreds of medical malpractice cases each year. We don't keep statistics either, but I do know that we are very successful in defending doctors accused of malpractice. I'd go so far as to say we win 90% of the time at trial. Does that mean the Dr. wasn't negligent? No. It just means that we proved to a jury of 12 people that the Dr. wasn't negligent. Of course, not all cases are tried. We settle many cases where our experts review the circumstances and tell us that Dr. X was negligent. In combining those death cases we settle and the death cases we lose at trial (only 1 in the last 5 years) I came up with my estimate that there are less than 50 negligent deaths caused by Physicians each year in the state of Oregon. The reason I question the 120,000 number is because "accidental death" is simply someone's opinion. If you asked a plaintiff's lawyer, he would probably say there are 1,000,000 or more accidental deaths caused by physicians. I am much more conservative and believe that in general, Doctors are well trained and rarely kill people. Like I said - accidental is one's opinion.

I'm conceding the fact that I could be 100% wrong - I'm just voicing my opinion based on my own personal experience in the field. Statistics like these just leave open too much room for interpretation - for crying out loud, they counted the votes in Florida 8 times and came up with a different # each time - and that was an objective test. They should have come up with the same # every time. "Accidental" requires subjective consideration and I'd like to know what criteria they used to define "accidental" before I decide whether the # is credible or not. It just seems high to me.

People like you and me cause many more "accidental deaths" each year than physicians. If you compared Doctors to the general public, I believe you'd find they cause less than 1% of the "accidental" deaths in the U.S. each year, and they are constantly treating people who are about to die. My point is that people like to blame things on people with educations - doctors, lawyers, politicians. You never see an email counting the number of people killed each year by taxi-cab drivers.

[Phish_on]

There are statistics for everything ("lies, dang lies, and statistics") - how many patients do those physicians see in a year? What is the deaths/patient visit rate? How about the "intentional death" rate from guns?

Aspirin kills more people every year than cannabis ever has. Let's make aspirin illegal.

[ 07-26-2001: Message edited by: Phish_on ]

[FM2]

Never trust stats issued by ANY govt. agency, you are led to believe liberal agenda's to accomodate special interest groups within the scope of the study !

[DanS]

Oh, no, not another meaningless statistical analysis.
If you hold a Ruger .44 and a S&W .357 at the same time, will it cause your blood pressure to plummet?

Will using Remington factory loads, and then switching to hand loads cause an allergic reaction?

Practicing medicine is a VERY complex occupation, and it should NEVER be compared to something like discharging a firearm. The ONLY thing that can be taken from this comparison is that your liklihood of being accidentally killed with a firearm is EXTREMELY small. Still, if it was your child killed by somebody's irresponsibly-used firearm, I'd wager you might think one accidental death is too much. However, in the REAL world, zero firearm deaths is not realistic. Store your weapon reponsibly, try to keep it out of irresponsible hands, and that's all that can be asked of you.

Baha', thanks for saving me the time to look up that info! Very interesting and disturbing. As for Killer' and others that dwell on stats, one way or the other, please don't let them be blinders to the obvious necessity to clean up carelessnes in the medical profession that leads to the deaths and injuries of so many people - as found in the Harvard study and the U.S. Dept. of HHS. These medical practioners aren't doing sloppy working on cars! They are working on priceless people and our loved ones!

RT

[Thumper]

RT and all: I am a medical consultant by trade. The statistics that RT cites have been found by several agancies to have been inflated, and there was an article to that effect in several medical publications and even the local the paper last week. The correct number of hospital-associated accidental ("iatrogenic") deaths is likely closer to 15,000, and that is bad enough. Still, it is a fact that when physicians go on strike in an area (as they did a few years ago in L.A.), deaths do decline, at least for a while.

[FM2]

I rest my case !! [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[Master Baiter]

You can't use the Florida example as a case in point. The numbers were probably different because one side was adding votes while the other was subtracting them during the numerous counts to! [img]images/icons/rolleyes.gif[/img] [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img] That whole process was rotten from the word GO.

[Phish_on]

Think about it ... how many people have you known who died after going to the doctor ?

mmmm hmmmm - I thought so

[img]images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]