The Continuing Plague of Medical Errors

More than a decade after the scathing report, "To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System," thousands of patients are still being plagued by medication errors and wrong diagnoses that lead to unnecessary surgery, chemotherapy, and death, according to U.S. News & World Report.

That 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine "charged that mistakes and unsafe practices in U.S. hospitals kill at least 44,000 patients a year and possibly twice as many, a number likened to the carnage that would occur if a jumbo jetliner went down daily in the country."

134,000 Medicare beneficiaries were found to be suffering from preventable errors in a 2010 government analysis, while a study published in Health Affairs  in April 2011 revealed that the standard methods hospitals use to detect medical errors fail over 90 percent of the time.

"I don't think that crashing a 727 jet every day and killing everybody aboard is a good standard of care in U.S. hospitals," says Paul Levy, former CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. "If that happened in aviation, they would shut the airlines down." Read the full details here:

Medical Errors Harm Huge Number of Patients: What will it take to make America's hospitals safer?

Steve Crandall, a top-rated medical malpractice attorney throughout Ohio and Kentucky, believes anyone who thinks there are "too many frivolous lawsuits" should read this article often.

"Medical errors wrongly kill enough Americans to equal a jumbo jet crash, on a daily basis," says Crandall. "Such a statistic should cause the discussion to shift from frivolous cases to how to prevent this and fix the problems causing these senseless deaths."