One of the first things a physician learns is to do the patient no harm, yet a Boston University study revealed that 36% of hospital admissions were the result of physicians’ blunders! And if your physician doesn’t blunder, the hospital might!

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, you have a 67% chance of misdiagnosis in a U.S. hospital and one third of U.S. hospitals admit that they have given patients the wrong blood! Also x-ray readers disagree up to 40% of the time! A Harvard study revealed that two doctors reading the same mammograms disagreed a third of the time!

Americans were shocked to read about the Tampa hospital where a patient’s good leg was amputated, and three weeks later a man was removed from a respirator, killing him. Don’t get sick in Tampa! And if you must get sick anyplace, don’t go to the hospital on the weekend. The staff is always overworked, under-experienced and understaffed. And you may go underground!

A female writer went to one of the world’s most prestigious cancer hospitals in Boston and received a huge overdose of cancer drugs that killed her leaving her two small children motherless.

A small child was admitted to a major New England hospital and was pumped full of cancer drugs by mistake, while another hospital admitted that they did an operation on the wrong side of a patient’s brain!

There have been so many blunders that many patients, just before surgery, write, “wrong kidney,” “wrong leg,” or “do not remove” to warn surgeons not to make an irreversible mistake. Surgeons removed my uncle’s good kidney instead of the bad one!

The Harvard School of Public Health reported on ABC News’  “Nightline” that about 1.3 million people per year suffer some type of injury because of hospital treatment with about 180,000 people dying as a result.

Hospitals are dangerous places to be, and if an incompetent surgeon doesn’t kill you, your anesthesiologist might! One big problem is that too many of them have fallen asleep on the job! Yes, that is true.

You should insist that all hospital personnel wash their hands before treating you. Of course, that should not be necessary, but many nurses and physicians do not wash their hands between patients! The biggest offenders are doctors! Could that be a reason two million patients pick up hospital infections that they didn’t have before they were admitted and about 60,000 people die each year from those infections?

You must also understand that just because you have a high-priced surgeon doesn’t mean he will actually do the surgery! Sometimes a less experienced doctor will do the surgery and your surgeon will supervise. You have a right to know that.

Many surgeries are completely unnecessary according to Dr. Holmes of Stanford University. He says that 30% to 50% of operations in the U.S. are unnecessary, and the American College of Surgeons admitted that eight times as many surgeries are done than are needed!

The Journal of the American Medical Association confessed that half of the 200,000 angioplasty surgeries were unnecessary! (Nor do they ever tell patients that they will be exposed to a radiation dose equal to 10,000 chest x-rays.)

They also don’t inform patients that the glamorous heart bypass surgery kills 8,000 Americans each year and two large studies have proved that bypass does not extend lives! Nor are patients told that 80% of all bypass grafts clog up again within 7 years! But bypass does produce $10 million per day!

Tags: health