Medicine's dirty secret: tens of thousands suffer injury and death from preventable error -

Each year tens of thousands of Americans are killed by medical mistakes and errors. These avoidable deaths and the many more injuries that happen in hospitals, nursing homes, surgery centers and medical offices are the dirty secret of U.S. medicine.

There’s some dispute over the numbers but only about whether the magnitude adds up to a lot or a whole lot. Multiple researchers have reported that roughly 685 Americans die each day due to medical errors, with the annual toll as many as 250,000. Health care professionals expressed shock almost two decades ago when the Institute of Medicine issued a landmark study calling preventable medical errors an “epidemic,” with experts estimating then that they caused 100,000 deaths annually...