Today's Terrifying Tour Through the News: Going to the Doctor Can Kill You

It seems doctors at Johns Hopkins University released a study this week with, as someone who spends a significant amount of time in medical facilities, what I found to be a slightly terrifying conclusion: medical errors are now the third leading cause of death in the United States. It seems some 700 people a day die, not from whatever it is that sent them to the doctor in the first place, but rather as a result of some avoidable mistake that happened while they were being cared for. 

Unfortunately, the brief article I saw did not mention what the number one and number two causes are since, statistically, you'd want to risk going to the doctor if you're dealing with one or two, but otherwise skip it. I mean, if you've got an ingrown toenail or something that's way down on the list of the causes of death, why would you want to risk going to the doctor which, according to this study at least, could take you from, say, number seventy-two to number three?

Which kind of makes you wonder why anybody goes to the doctor at all. 

Maybe my Dad had it right all those years ago. There wasn't much that would send him to the doctor and now that I think about it, if I'm recalling correctly, it wasn't the leukemia that killed him, but rather complications from the surgery to place the port needed for the treatment that he never got. 

Which makes me think that I may have mischaracterized this story. Maybe this is actually today's happy news: instead of dying from cancer, there's a reasonably good chance I could die from a medical error. 

It's a very strange world we live in.