MedicalErrors

Jerome R Hoffman and Hemal K Kanzaria argue that efforts to reduce overdiagnosis and overtreatment should focus on changing professional and public attitudes towards medical error and uncertainty  

Redesigned labels reduce the number of errors in simulated surgical emergency, study findsSpecial redesigned labels for intravenous (IV) medication bags may help to...  

I am joined by Bryan Hayes to discuss the avoidance of critical medication errors during resuscitations.  

CPS kidnaps teen after heart attack, misdiagnoses mother with Munchausen by proxy  

The field of medical statistics is poorly understood by many doctors and by most patients. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine that surveyed over 100 articles published in reputable medical journals stated that over 50% of them used medical statistics incorrectly, and furthermore stated that this misuse invalidated the clinical conclusions of many of these articles. In this blog I will not discuss esoterica such as when to use a two-tailed t-test rather than a one-tailed test, or the uses and misuses of the Cox regression analysis. Instead I will try to point out fallacies in reasoning and statistics that should cause you to doubt a result quoted in the journal or in the newspapers.  

*Errors in Emergency Medicine* Medical error is the 6th leading cause of death in North America, and despite huge advances in imaging technology and lab test...