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A hospital in Massachusetts apparently exposed more than 400 patients to HIV and Hepatitis
For 2 years Salem Hospital in Massachusetts was risking exposing people to HIV and hepatitis if they received IV medications in that hospital.
Nearly 450 people were potentially infected thanks to this extreme carelessness.
9 Patients Reported Dead in Oregon After Nurse Allegedly Injected Them With Tap Water Instead of Medication
Police in Medford, Oregon, are investigating a nurse at Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center after several patients died after the nurse allegedly ejected them with tap water instead of their prescribed medication.
NBC affiliate KGW 8 News reported that a nurse assigned to the ICU at Asante Rogue Reginal Medical Center replaced a patient’s fentanyl medication with tap water, which resulted in several patients dying from deadly infections.
Hospital sources told KOBI 5, “Tap water, which isn’t sterile, led to multiple infections of Pseudomonas.”
Dr. Robin Miller, who hosts KOBI’s Docs on Call series, shared, “It could cause sepsis, pneumonia. It could infect all the organs. So it can be a very severe infection.”
Consider “Joan Morris”, age 67, who was admitted for evaluation and treatment of a brain aneurysm. She was resting after a procedure when she was abruptly taken off by mistake — over her own protests! — to have invasive cardiac testing followed by placement of a pacemaker / defibrillator.
A root cause analysis described in Annals of Internal Medicine found 17 separate errors had to happen for “Joan Morris” to get the cardiac procedure meant for “Jane Morrison.”
As I write this in 2025, the American healthcare system consumes $4.8 trillion annually¹—more than the entire GDP of Germany. We have more specialists, more drugs, more procedures, and more sophisticated imaging technology than ever before in human history. And yet, by nearly every meaningful metric, we're sicker than ever. Chronic disease affects 60% of Americans². Mental health disorders have reached epidemic proportions³. And most damning of all: medical errors and correctly prescribed medications have become the third leading cause of death⁴.
The math is staggering. Each year, over 440,000 Americans die from preventable medical errors⁵. Another 128,000 die from properly prescribed pharmaceuticals⁶. That's more than half a million casualties annually from a system designed to heal. To put this in perspective, we lost 58,220 American lives during the entire Vietnam War. Our medical system kills that many people every six weeks.
But here's where the story takes an extraordinary turn. Just as this bloated, dangerous system reaches peak dysfunction, a quiet revolution is emerging from the most unlikely source: peer-reviewed medical journals. Study after study is revealing something that would have been heretical just a generation ago. Sometimes—often, in fact—doing nothing is not just safer than medical intervention. It's more effective.
In 2013, something remarkable happened that should have made front-page news but instead was buried in the medical literature. A National Cancer Institute expert panel dropped what can only be described as an atomic bomb on the cancer industry. They concluded that millions of "cancers" we'd been aggressively treating—including ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) and high-grade prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PIN)—weren't actually cancers at all⁷.
Let that sink in for a moment. These conditions, which had been diagnosed as "breast cancer" and "prostate cancer" in millions of people, were reclassified as "benign or indolent lesions of epithelial origin." In plain English: harmless cellular changes that would never have caused symptoms or death if left alone.
The implications are staggering. A 2012 New England Journal of Medicine study estimated that 1.3 million American women had been wrongly treated for breast cancer over the previous three decades⁸. These women underwent surgeries, radiation, chemotherapy—with all their attendant suffering, disfigurement, and risk—for conditions that weren't actually threatening their lives.
You might expect such a revelation to transform medical practice overnight. You'd be wrong. More than a decade later, the same overdiagnosis and overtreatment continues largely unabated. Why? The answer reveals something profound about how our medical system operates—and why "doing nothing" has become, paradoxically, a radical act.
Follow the money, as they say. The cancer screening and treatment industry generates roughly $156 billion annually in the United States alone⁹. Every mammogram that leads to a biopsy, every biopsy that leads to a lumpectomy, every lumpectomy that leads to radiation—each step in this cascade generates revenue. The average cost of breast cancer treatment can exceed $100,000¹⁰. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of overdiagnosed cases, and you begin to understand why there's little institutional incentive to embrace watchful waiting.
But the costs aren't merely financial. There's a human price that can't be captured in spreadsheets. When a doctor tells you "You have cancer," something fundamental shifts in your psyche. Studies show that cancer patients have a significantly increased risk of suicide in the first year after diagnosis¹¹. Heart attack rates spike¹². Even when the "cancer" is successfully treated, the psychological wounds often never fully heal.
This is what researchers call the nocebo effect—placebo's evil twin. Where placebo harnesses belief to heal, nocebo weaponizes fear to harm. And modern medicine, with its culture of defensive practice and catastrophic thinking, has become a nocebo delivery system of unprecedented scale.
Seems 'medical error' has become 'medical malice aforethought for profit'.
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Each year, between 98,000 to 440,000 people die unnecessarily from hospital and doctor error.
On the other hand, deaths from flu AND pneumonia) are considered to be the eighth leading cause on a list that doesn't even list medical mistakes.
Don't believe the hype. Please don't get vaccinated for the flu out of fear. Vaccinated persons can still catch the flu.
Instead of "147 Flu Deaths This Season", why don't they blare headlines "Thousands Dying From Medical Malpractice"?
Answer: AMA
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-many-die-from-medical-mistakes-in-us-hospitals/