From
The Daily Dose newsletter by Jack Harrison May 11, 2016
The Killer health hazard you need to know
I’m sure you’ve heard a million times that the nation’s leading cause of death is heart disease, and number two on the list is all forms of cancer combined.
But I’ll bet you’ll never guess #3.
It’s a common health hazard your doc will never warn you of… one that has no ribbons or awareness campaigns… and one the CDC itself doesn’t even track as its own category.
It’s MEDICAL MISTAKES!
No one ever gets “DOCTOR ERROR” listed on a death certificate, so the CDC has no stats on them — at least in part because docs won’t even own up to them.
So investigators from the world-famous Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine did what the CDC has failed to do: They’ve combed through the records to find the REAL causes of death.
They found that medical mistakes kill more than a quarter of a million Americans every year.
That’s nearly 1 in 10 of all deaths.
We’re being killed by our supposed care!
That means medical mistakes — just in cases of inpatient hospitalizations alone — now kill more Americans than any single form of cancer. Heck, they kill more Americans than lung, breast, and prostate cancers combined.
These errors are responsible for nearly twice as many deaths as stroke…nearly triple the deaths from Alzheimer’s…and more than four times the death toll from flu and pneumonia.
And those traffic accidents that people are always gawking at? Those kill 33,000 people annually — and the numbers have been dropping every year.
Medical mistakes, on the other hand, seem to be getting worse — and even the ones that won’t KILL you could leave you disabled or disfigured.
These numbers come as a huge shock to the mainstream, but they’ve been hiding in plain sight all along.
A 2011 study you read about right here in the Daily Dose found that up to 1 in 3 hospital patients are the victim of at least some form of screw-up. That’s TEN times as many errors as are officially reported!
Like I said, docs hate admitting this stuff.
You might think there’s nothing you can do about it… that when you’re wheeled into the hospital, you’re pretty much taking a spin on the roulette wheel of death.
But there IS something you can do.
Start by warning your spouse and your friends, because odds are one of you… and likely ALL of you… will be in a hospital at some point.
Then, make a deal: When one of you goes in, everyone else takes turns watching, like a nest of angry hawks. We know from earlier studies that the most common mistakes are related to meds, including wrong meds and overdoses of meds, so question absolute every drug brought into the room.
But it’s not just meds, and it’s not just doctors, either. Every single person on staff at a hospital who’s attending to your care while you’re there could make a mistake…whether it’s giving you an invasive test that you don’t actually need…or using a dirty scope that infects you with an antibiotic-resistant superbug.
Make them double- and triple-check if you have to — because, as the new study shows, this is literally a life-or-death situation.