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A study published in the BMJ found that medical errors may be the third leading cause of death in the United States:
The IOM, based on one study, estimated deaths because of medical errors as high as 98,000 a year. Makary's research involves a more comprehensive analysis of four large studies, including ones by the Health and Human Services Department's Office of the Inspector General and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that took place between 2000 to 2008. His calculation of 251,000 deaths equates to nearly 700 deaths a day — about 9.5 percent of all deaths annually in the United States.
And from the airplane analogy, a simple fix: checklists.
Is it time for a system theory approach to medicine?
Medical error—the third leading cause of death in the US (DOI: 10.1136/bmj.i2139)
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Saturday May 14 2016, @09:08PM
Depending on how you choose to segregate causes of death, you can make almost anything the n-th leading cause of death.
Read the article. It's a standard segregation of causes of death by the US government. Anything that becomes the third cause of death has to kill on average at least 147k people in the US per year to achieve that (to beat out respiratory diseases which are traditionally in third place). And death due to medical error is a significant distinguishing factor unlike cell death. So we have a significant number of deaths per year coupled with a significant distinction, that means there is meaning here.