Medical Error Quotes & Sayings

Much of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition. However, the focus on error does not denigrate human intelligence, any more than the attention to diseases in medical texts denies good health. — Daniel Kahneman

The man who doctors himself with the aid of medical books, runs the risk of dying of a typographical error. — Evan Esar

It is almost impossible for contemporaries to judge the true value of discoveries, or to give the proper position to the men of their own time who make these discoveries. The Surgeon-General of the Public Health Service expected the greatest results to flow from his commission of medical officers, but the conclusions of the Board turned out to be all wrong, while he did not notice the report from his own subordinate, Dr. H. R. Carter, which turned out to be pure gold and was one of the great steps in establishing the true method of the transmission of Yellow Fever. — William Crawford Gorgas

The single greatest impediment to error prevention in the medical industry is that we punish people for making mistakes, — Lucian Leape

Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years time. — Marcel Proust

A hospital patient can expect one medical error every single day of any hospital stay. Malpractice suits are numerous enough that one may reasonably conclude that there is certainly no guarantee of proper health care by contracting it out. — Andrew Saul

it makes medical error the third leading cause of death in the United States today, just behind heart disease and cancer. — Leslie Michelson

For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years' time. So that to believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not greater folly still, for from this mass of errors there have emerged in the course of time many truths. — Marcel Proust

Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), included a recent article by Barbara Starfield, M.D., stating that physician error, medication error and adverse events from drugs or surgery kill 225,400 people per year (Chart 1.5).11 That makes our health care system the third leading cause of death in the United States, behind only cancer and heart disease — T. Colin Campbell

The taxonomy of medical error is vast, colorful, and at times confusing. There are slips, lapses, harmless hits, and near misses; errors of omission and of commission; operator errors, system errors, accidents, complications, and bad outcomes. — Nancy Berlinger