“Few things are deadlier than doctors’ screw-ups. NASA’s chief toxicologist calculated in 2013 that medical error kills between 210,000 and 440,000 Americans each year. Only heart disease and cancer have a higher body count.”
To read more, visit The Wall St Journal.
Leonard Lopate: Many bad doctors have been responsible for deaths or serious injuries of more than one patient. How do they avoid prosecution? Why are they allowed to continue practicing?
James Lieber: Many states have very lax licensing controls. So a doctor can screw up in Colorado, and go to Utah, or Arizona or Hawaii. That’s what has happened.
Leonard Lopate: They don’t ask the previous place of employment what happened, why the doctor left?
James Lieber: Well there are some reform laws, including one in Colorado, after this young man, Michael Skolnik, went to a neurosurgeon who did an unnecessary brain surgery, which completely retarded him, ruined his endocrine system. He had a horrible final year of life. Turned out that doctor had not been candid about his background. Colorado implemented a law that now makes physicians and many healthcare providers be candid about their backgrounds and any problems they have had or they can’t get license in Colorado.
To listen to the full interview, visit WNYC.
“My goal is to bring this atrocious social problem that kills upwards of a quarter of a million people per year to the attention of the public,” Lieber says in an email. “Like Ralph Nader, I think people have a right to be free from physical mayhem caused by businesses, including health care.”
To read the rest of the review, visit Princeton Alumni blog.
By the end of the twentieth century, the health-care industry was avid about getting its arms around the problem of error. The news about accidents among the rich and poor, famous and obscure was alarming the public and undermining its confidence in the profession. Malpractice claims were on the rise; so were monetary payouts. Insurers, hospitals, and physicians pushed back with “tort reform” designed to award and divert litigation. Since lawsuits often arose from treatment, “quality of care” initiatives grew as a method of preventing cases. All of these issues focused researchers on two problems. First, how should medical errors be defined? Second, how many of them were there?
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit AlterNet.
With Sherman’s approval, the trainee doctors ordered an injection of meperidine, an opiate sedative, to try to quell her jerking. Then the intern and resident intermittently spent about two hours with her, until Stone went across the street to the hospital’s sleeping quarters to nap. Weinstein concentrated on the other patients. Around three in the morning, a nurse called her to report that Libby was trying to yank her tubes out. Weinstein ordered restraints and a shot of haloperidol, an antipsychotic. Libby slept, but at dawn her fever surged to 107 degrees, she went into cardiac arrest, and died.
Weinstein called the family. She and the hospital took the position that the young woman had a “bad outcome” from a strange and unknown infection. Soon it became known that mixing the dying woman’s antidepressant Nardil (phenelzine) with Demerol (meperidine hydrochloride, an anti-spasmodic and painkiller) could trigger a fatal drug interaction.
Sidney Zion’s rage was towering, his grief bottomless, and his connections legendary. “Murder” was how he described his daughter’s demise: “They gave her a drug that was destined to kill her, then ignored her except to tie her down like a dog.” He lacerated the venerable hospital for the hazing of residents that forced them to work for days at a clip and sometimes over a hundred hours per week. “You don’t need kindergarten,” he inveighed in a New York Times op-ed piece, “to know that a resident working a 36-hour shift is in no condition to make any kind of judgment call—forget about life and death.”
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit TruthDig.
An anthology calling upon American writers to address the plight of the Palestinians. Editor Freeman notes in her introduction, “what can and cannot be done in America is a question that carries enormous hope on the part of people who do not live here.” ….A vibrant, high-spirited collection that will appeal to those on one side of this complex geopolitical conundrum.
To read the full review of Extraordinary Rendition, visit Kirkus Reviews.
A succinct, disturbing report on the prevalence of malpractice in modern medicine. Fortunately, Lieber doesn’t decorate his study with scare tactics or confusing jargon; his perspective is clearly that of an informed consumer concerned with the welfare of those seeking American medical care. …An imperative analysis that begs for discussion by industry watchdogs and consumers alike.
To read the full review of Killer Care, visit Kirkus Reviews.
