Monday, April 18, 2005
Guns, doctors, and death
Via vodkapundit, I learned that guns don't kill people, doctors do, and he's got the statistics to back it up (an accidental death due to an encounter with a doctor is orders of magnitude more likely than an accidental death from a gun).
Outlaw doctors today!
(Side note - I'm rather swamped for the next month. So don't look for anything substantitve until mid-May).
Update
For those who wonder if the poster made up the 120,000 annual deaths due to medical error, here's some links from my very quick tour around google.
(linked article says that ~225,000 people die due to factors introduced by hospital, i.e., errors + side effects + infections).
A lot of that story's info comes from this JAMA paper (need a VT pid).
This Massachussetts Nurses Association article has a lot more about the rate of deaths due to medical error (it's quite high) and says the 120,000 number explicitly comes from a 1993 study.
We can quibble about the exact number, but dying due to a medical error in a hospital is orders of magnitude more likely than dying due to an accidental gun shot.
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Outlaw doctors today!
(Side note - I'm rather swamped for the next month. So don't look for anything substantitve until mid-May).
Update
For those who wonder if the poster made up the 120,000 annual deaths due to medical error, here's some links from my very quick tour around google.
A lot of that story's info comes from this JAMA paper (need a VT pid).
This Massachussetts Nurses Association article has a lot more about the rate of deaths due to medical error (it's quite high) and says the 120,000 number explicitly comes from a 1993 study.
We can quibble about the exact number, but dying due to a medical error in a hospital is orders of magnitude more likely than dying due to an accidental gun shot.
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