Exhibit 169 · Journal commentary
Is US health really the best in the world?
These total to 225 000 deaths per year from iatrogenic causes.
Summed published US estimates of deaths from medical care: 12,000 a year from unnecessary surgery, 7,000 from medication errors in hospitals, 20,000 from other errors in hospitals, 80,000 from nosocomial infections in hospitals and 106,000 from non-error adverse effects of medications, a total of 225,000. Noted that most data came from hospitalized patients, that the figures counted deaths only, and that using the IOM's higher error estimates gave 230,000 to 284,000. Called 225,000 the third leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease and cancer. Cited a separate outpatient analysis estimating 199,000 additional deaths.
- Source
- Barbara Starfield, JAMA 284(4):483–485
- Date
- 26 July 2000
- Quoted from
- JAMA 284(4):483-485, p. 483 (Commentary), following the list of five estimates
- Grade
- Peer-reviewed
- Document
- https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/192908
- Accessed
- 2026-11-09
- Cited by
- Findings citing this exhibit
- Note
- Components checked against the JAMA reprint hosted at https://lakeslab.ep.wisc.edu/iatrogenic.pdf (p. 484). The published breakdown includes the 80,000 hospital-infection deaths; one secondary account that says the total excludes them is contradicted by the commentary.