Re: [Marxism] On Schiavo

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Andy Coates wrote:

> I overheard my three year-old talking with my five year old the other
> day.  At one point in their conversation the younger one exclaimed
> "No!  I am *not* going to die."  The older one responded with
> characteristic emphasis:  "Yes you are.  We all die.  Because dying is
> part of life."  Out of the mouths of babes.

i've met this three year old several times. you don't want to tangle
with her, even if she makes the occasional mistake.

> Of death and dying in America, there is much to fear.  Consider that
> statistic that says that nearly 200,000 people die annually of medical
> errors.


A JAMA article from March 9, 2005 repeats the claim from a 1997 study
that 770,000 people a year are killed or injured in Adverse Drug Events
(ADEs). The article further claimed that prescribing errors are the most
frequent source of these problems.

The article itself, "Role of Computerized Physician Order Entry Systems
in Facilitating Medication Errors", is one of the first of its kind to
evaluate the new IT systems being put in place supposedly to counter
these errors. Not surprisingly, the authors found some very basic
problems with the new software which in some cases contributed to
further injuries.

The article ends with the claim that many of the shortcomings they
discovered in software system could be easily corrected. But in an IT
industry that gets $34M a pop for these systems, with intense rivalry
between existing vendors, IP and privacy, incompatible protocols between
different database systems, and so forth, fixing the fixer takes on a
kind of Rube Goldberg quality. Meanwhile capital investment in medical
technology channels itself into ventures most likely to turn the
healthiest profit, rather than the healthiest system.

les schaffer



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