Practical costs of the diversity dream, medicine edition
Several times recently I’ve seen a line item in a graph of leading causes of death that stands out impressively. The item: medical error.
The data are hard to pin down as there are all sorts of opacities in reporting, honest attribution, uncertain attribution, combined causes, and so on. Nonetheless there seems to be a consensus that the number is very high. A study by Johns Hopkins this year pegged it as the third-leading cause of death for Americans, behind heart disease and cancer.
That’s pretty f’n nuts, if you ask me. It makes gun deaths and car deaths almost trivial by comparison (each being roughly one-tenth as lethal, including suicides). With the caveat that part of this info push is the standard nudge toward more regulation, more licensing, more education, more tax, more government–we can still agree that doctors and other health professionals are killing a ton of people.
Which brings to mind another chart:
This one shows acceptance rates to medical school of people with average, somewhat below-average, and somewhat above-average credentials. I assume you don’t need further hand-holding, but one takeaway is that if you’re black and you can show up for class occasionally, welcome to med school, doctor!
We’ll never in this lifetime get the data on which doctors are killing how many people, but I’d class it as Not Very Speculative to say: a) there is a correlation between intelligence and error rates; b) this same selection process happens across the health professions. Retarded nurses are probably more dangerous than retarded doctors, from my brief experiences in hospitals.
You might object that admission to school is only one hurdle, but I’ll save a longer discussion and point out briefly: medical school attrition runs around 5%, schools want high graduation rates, and schools do not want their minority cohort to fail. Thus rigor is thrown to the wind. Law school is the same story.
Out of curiosity I searched two college classmates who became doctors. One was a legitimate whiz kid, the other a nice guy who enjoyed partying and golf and didn’t get acceptance to a U.S. med school despite his minority status. Nonetheless he went to med school in the Caribbean and now is a practicing physician in California.
The first appears to be a squeaky-clean cardiologist, well-reviewed by his patients. The other is a sports and family practice doctor in SoCal. Among his reviews (edited to protect his anonymity):
Dr. ****** prescribed a 7.5 mg dose of ***** to my mom on Feb. 25, 20**. This level is too high for a person her age (2-4 mg is normal) and can cause fatal bleeding. My mom died on March 2, 20**, apparently from a brain bleed due to ******.
Dr. ****** has twice deleted this review ... The complaint was substantiated by the CA Department of Public Health.
These are mere anecdotes, of course. The stats will be forever hidden, so go forth with your best guesses.