medical errors
kkrisberg | March 16, 2016At Vox, Sarah Kliff writes about the side of medical errors we rarely hear about — the doctors and nurses who make such errors and the mental health toll of living with that responsibility. In an article that explores whether health care workers are getting the support they need to deal with such experiences, Kliff begins with the story of nurse Kim Hiatt:
Kim Hiatt had worked as a nurse for 24 years when she made her first medical error: She gave a frail infant 10 times the recommended dosage of a medication. The baby died five days later.
Hiatt's mistake was an unnecessary tragedy. But what…
lborkowski | May 25, 2012Earlier this month, NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health released the results (PDF) of a poll they conducted to learn about the experiences of the 27% of US adults who reported having serious healthcare needs (specifically, those who’d been hospitalized overnight in the past year or who reported having an illness, medical condition, injury, or disability that requires lots of medical care). It’s no surprise that many of the poll respondents reported serious problems with healthcare costs, which sometimes resulted in them not getting needed care. But…
oracknows | January 27, 2010And now for something completely different.
I've been on a bit of a tear the last few days beating on Mike Adams, someone who arguably deserves the title of Woo--meister Supreme, but it's important to remember that defending science-based medicine is more than just having a little fun every now and then slapping down quacks. It's also about turning the same skeptical eyes that recognize the woo that people like Adams, Mercola, and the anti-vaccine movement promote onto scientific medicine when appropriate. That's because, at its best, science-based medicine is always trying to improve…
ddobbs | March 10, 2009"How We Decide" author Jonah Lehrer, fresh from a book tour of the UK, offers what he calls a "spluttering answer" (it's really quite lucid) to a question he says he's getting a lot these days: What decision-making errors were involved in our current financial meltdown??
The short version of his answer -- well worth reading in its entirety -- is that we (and big investment outfits particularlyl) succumbed to an abhorrence of uncertainty.
We hate not knowing, and this often leads us to neglect relevant information that might undermine the certainty of our conclusions. I think some of the…