Faith in Science?

[JuliaL]

JuliaL

I believe this medical statistic is extremely misleading. What was their criterion to decide that a patient died at the doctor's hands, or "from" medicine?

Isn't "at the doctor's hands" a subset of "from medicine?" Or were you referring to drugs only and not the entire practice?

The original article is in Journal of the AMA.
JAMA, July 26,2000 Vol 284, No 4
I didn't find a full copy online with graphics and formatting. I did find an image of the first page of the JAMA article at:
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx...eid=192908
and an unformatted copy of the text of the article appears to be at:
http://www.ecologos.org/ushealth.htm
From a quick scan, I didn't see how they discriminated between 'adverse reactions' which came about from erroneous drug administration and non-erroneous drug administration. The bibliography includes several references in which I think the data is hiding if you wish to probe further.

I was surprised that this article is nearly 15 years old. I remember it as being much more recent, but perhaps time is passing faster than it used to.