3 ms·

If we forbid all operations, a lot fewer people will die in surgery.

• tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  I remember Atul Gawande mentioning in one of his books that patient deaths slow when their surgeons take a holiday.
  • jobigoud 7y ago
    Normalized by number of surgeries?
  • downerending 7y ago
    Don't recall the details, but I think this was for a few specific kinds of procedures (cardiac-related?). There certainly is a problem with iatrogenic deaths (those caused by medical attention itself), but it would be quite a bit too far to say that surgery is on balance harmful taken as a whole. (And indeed, the point of my remark was that a falling traffic fatality rate isn't necessarily a good thing, once one looks at the entire picture.)