= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Now that running regularly, for fitness and to keep my weight down, is a well established habit, I've signed up to run a half-marathon next March. (Not without a twinge of sadness, thinking of Hal Finney.)
Instead of just going out for a run on sundays and the occasional weekday, I'm now "following a training plan", that is, running workouts with specific targets, using a heart rate monitor, and so on. It makes some interesting differences and I've learned a few things.
One aspect of keeping fit that I'm still somewhat failing at, despite much self-monitoring and various attempts at behavior change, is getting more sleep. I'm still sleep-deprived (less than 5h) two or three nights a week.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
The "98,000 patients" claim is really interesting as an example of Dark Arts, aside from its having been debunked often.
It is often presented as follows: "98,000 deaths per year from medical errors (the equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every day)".
It would be... provided every single jumbo jet flying in the US was populated by people already seriously ill or injured in the first place, rather than (as is actually the case) not only healthy but generally also wealthy passengers.
Of course you're supposed to overlook that trivial difference in the demographics of people who are in planes and those who are in hospitals, and picture hospitals killing healthy rich people by the planeload.
(This also suggests that "number of deaths" is a poor metric for making such estimates and comparisons; it would be better to compute "overall loss of expected QALYs resulting from preventable mistakes in medical care" and compare that with aggregate loss of QUALYs from other causes. Of course that's much less catchy.)
Interestingly this article offers a QUALY-based economic estimate, but for some weird reasons plucks a wild ass guess as to the average number of years of life lost as a result of medical errors - ten years, with not the slightest justification. Of course this leads to a largish estimate of total impact.
This other article updates the estimates of annual deaths in the US to 400,000 with a lower bound of 210,000. This may be the result of misapplying an estimate of what fraction of adverse events are preventable - this was estimated on the overall sample (including non-fatal adverse events) but then applied to the much smaller set of fatal adverse events. Most fatal events result from surgery, which the same article notes has a much lower rate of "preventable" events, but I can't see that the total deaths estimate accounts for that.