medical error

It is an unquestioned belief among believers in alternative medicine and even just among many people who do not trust conventional medicine that conventional medicine kills. Not only does exaggerating the number of people who die due to medical complications or errors fit in with the world view of people like Mike Adams and Joe Mercola, but it's good for business. After all, if conventional medicine is as dangerous as claimed, then alternative medicine starts looking better in comparison. In contrast, real physicians and real medical scientists are very much interested in making medicine…
"One in six patients 'wrongly diagnosed by NHS doctors'," shouts the Daily Mail (via EvidenceMatters. This should not surprise us: Autopsies have been finding a similar percentage of misdiagnosis among the dead for decades. Doctors will always miss some diagnoses. Progress is a matter of ever narrowing the list of things doctors miss -- so the other problems can be diagnosed and treated, letting the patients live longer (till they did of something incurable -- or something we still haven't learned to diagnose. Learn to properly diagnose, say, appendicitis, and you can save the life of a10-…