There has recently been a lot of hype over a “new” study claiming that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US (this was really just a rehash of previous studies). Dr. Gorski has already done a fantastic job of explaining why that estimate is likely inaccurate, so I am going to focus on a slightly different issue that he only talked about briefly. Namely, even if the estimate is accurate, it would not support the conclusion that we should abandon modern medicine and switch to “alternative” medicines. In other words, many people try to use statistics like this to claim that modern medicine is actually dangerous and should be avoided, and that claim is extremely flawed for several reasons.
Image via the CDC
First, as I recently explained in a different post, mortality rates in the US have been steadily decreasing with time, and that…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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