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Priorities are important. Completely preventable medical errors kill TEN TIMES as many Americans as firearms do, even including suicide-by-gun as a firearm dea

by caeril 6y ago

Priorities are important. Completely preventable medical errors kill TEN TIMES as many Americans as firearms do, even including suicide-by-gun as a firearm death (which, incidentally, far oustrips firearm-related homicide or accidents). I'm still waiting for Congress to even propose, let alone pass, the bill that mandates background checks for nurses to know how to properly multiply or divide drug IV dosages by ten, or to learn the difference between milli- and micro-. I'm still waiting for doctors to have to wait ten days for multiparty approval on their decision to proceed with a procedure predicated on an obvious misread of the patient's chart. Until that day, gun control advocates have the blood of 590 Americans on their hands, every day, for choosing their Cause Célèbre to be something that kills far, far fewer people than a much, much bigger problem. Reminder that any policy advocacy position that comes from any standpoint other than holistic harm prevention has one goal, and one goal only: power and control. edit: HN hivemind apparently believes I am factually incorrect. Approximately 24k Americans die annually via firearms[1], whereas approximately 250k Americans die annually via preventable medical errors[2]. [1] https://health.ucdavis.edu/what-you-can-do/facts.html https://health.ucdavis.edu/what-you-can-do/facts.html [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139.full https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139.full

dragonwriter 6y ago
> I'm still waiting for Congress to even propose, let alone pass, the bill that mandates background checks for nurses to know how to properly multiply or divide drug IV dosages by ten, or to learn the difference between mill- and micro Nursing licensing standards already cover that skill (and a lot more.) Congress has also worked to promote things that deal with actual problems that exist, rather than things that are long solved, and which have been demonstrated to reduce preventable medical errors like meaningful use of EMRs; knowing how to multiply and divide correctly doesn't help when poor, unstructured records give you inaccurate or incomplete information to start with.
- caeril 6y ago
  Drug dosage administration errors are still a not-insignificant cause of death, and are by no means a completely solved problem. And I already addressed the charting defects. My broader point is that if you are a policy advocate, and you have N hours to dedicate to a specific policy advocacy, if you choose a cause that addresses the death of far fewer people than a more significant problem, your choice is a violation of the least-harm principle, and you are indirectly responsible for allowing more people to die than if you had made a more factually-aligned choice. Gun control advocates are, therefore, obviously driven by a desire to control others, and not by any serious intention to save lives. A decision to advocate for gun control is a conscious decision to NOT advocate ( per limited hours/resources tradeoffs ) for cancer treatment research, dietary policy improvements, medical error prevention, traffic safety research funding, environmental policy, Alzheimer's research, or any number of things that will save more lives. It's rational to assume that the motivation is something other than actually saving human life. Control and power, being common and time-tested motivations of humans, seems to be a reasonable first assumption.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Drug dosage administration errors are still a not-insignificant cause of death, and are by no means a completely solved problem. But the cause of that problem isn't even arguably “there is no required testing to verify they nurses can do the task appropriately”, since there is, in fact, required testing that includes that within it's scope. So the idea that Congress enacting a new requirement on that would be parallel to it's initial adoption of a background check requirement for guns but for a more pressing problem is not defensible. The fact that Congress has also repeatedly recently adopted (not merely discussed) new rules designed to address things that are actually empirically contributors to avoidable medical errors also demonstrates that the implication that that is being neglected while gun control is being discussed is also false. > My broader point is that if you are a policy advocate, and you have N hours to dedicate to a specific policy advocacy, if you choose a cause that addresses the death of far fewer people than a more significant problem, your choice is a violation of the least-harm principle If you assume that every advocate is equally effective in all issues, and that the targets of that advocacy are equally easily moved on all issues, and that the effect of policy change that would be acheived by the same movement of decision-makers is proportional to the scale of the problem being addressed, then this is a defensible position. But none of those are reasonable assumptions.
blablabla123 6y ago
> Completely preventable medical errors kill TEN TIMES as > many Americans as firearms do, even including suicide-by- > gun as a firearm death (which, incidentally, far oustrips > firearm-related homicide or accidents). This is quite a jump from guns to medical errors and I think this is comparing apples and oranges. It seems absurd to me only fix "burning" issues because then only mediocrity can be reached. It's better to fix root causes. That said, I wonder how many of these errors happen because both medical personal and patients are under extreme stress due to a bad financial situation, a dangerous neighborhood etc. Imagine you live in a neighborhood where people have guns and actually use them. Wouldn't you be a bit stressed out and thus being more prone to make errors, communicate incorrectly, both as patient but also as nurse/doctor?
- yeetawayhn 6y ago
  > Imagine you live in a neighborhood where people have guns and actually use them. Wouldn't you be a bit stressed out and thus being more prone to make errors, communicate incorrectly, both as patient but also as nurse/doctor? No, have you never lived in a rural area?
ericb 6y ago
Speaking for myself, I downvoted not because you are factually wrong. I downvoted because your entire argument is whataboutism. It is irrelevant to the topic being discussed, and makes the entire debate worse for its presence.
- Bancakes 6y ago
  Giving any sort of context in order to destroy FUD is now whatabautism? I guess you just have confirmation bias, huh.

by caeril 6y ago

dragonwriter 6y ago

> I'm still waiting for Congress to even propose, let alone pass, the bill that mandates background checks for nurses to know how to properly multiply or divide drug IV dosages by ten, or to learn the difference between mill- and micro Nursing licensing standards already cover that skill (and a lot more.) Congress has also worked to promote things that deal with actual problems that exist, rather than things that are long solved, and which have been demonstrated to reduce preventable medical errors like meaningful use of EMRs; knowing how to multiply and divide correctly doesn't help when poor, unstructured records give you inaccurate or incomplete information to start with.

caeril 6y ago
Drug dosage administration errors are still a not-insignificant cause of death, and are by no means a completely solved problem. And I already addressed the charting defects. My broader point is that if you are a policy advocate, and you have N hours to dedicate to a specific policy advocacy, if you choose a cause that addresses the death of far fewer people than a more significant problem, your choice is a violation of the least-harm principle, and you are indirectly responsible for allowing more people to die than if you had made a more factually-aligned choice. Gun control advocates are, therefore, obviously driven by a desire to control others, and not by any serious intention to save lives. A decision to advocate for gun control is a conscious decision to NOT advocate ( per limited hours/resources tradeoffs ) for cancer treatment research, dietary policy improvements, medical error prevention, traffic safety research funding, environmental policy, Alzheimer's research, or any number of things that will save more lives. It's rational to assume that the motivation is something other than actually saving human life. Control and power, being common and time-tested motivations of humans, seems to be a reasonable first assumption.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Drug dosage administration errors are still a not-insignificant cause of death, and are by no means a completely solved problem. But the cause of that problem isn't even arguably “there is no required testing to verify they nurses can do the task appropriately”, since there is, in fact, required testing that includes that within it's scope. So the idea that Congress enacting a new requirement on that would be parallel to it's initial adoption of a background check requirement for guns but for a more pressing problem is not defensible. The fact that Congress has also repeatedly recently adopted (not merely discussed) new rules designed to address things that are actually empirically contributors to avoidable medical errors also demonstrates that the implication that that is being neglected while gun control is being discussed is also false. > My broader point is that if you are a policy advocate, and you have N hours to dedicate to a specific policy advocacy, if you choose a cause that addresses the death of far fewer people than a more significant problem, your choice is a violation of the least-harm principle If you assume that every advocate is equally effective in all issues, and that the targets of that advocacy are equally easily moved on all issues, and that the effect of policy change that would be acheived by the same movement of decision-makers is proportional to the scale of the problem being addressed, then this is a defensible position. But none of those are reasonable assumptions.

blablabla123 6y ago

> Completely preventable medical errors kill TEN TIMES as > many Americans as firearms do, even including suicide-by- > gun as a firearm death (which, incidentally, far oustrips > firearm-related homicide or accidents). This is quite a jump from guns to medical errors and I think this is comparing apples and oranges. It seems absurd to me only fix "burning" issues because then only mediocrity can be reached. It's better to fix root causes. That said, I wonder how many of these errors happen because both medical personal and patients are under extreme stress due to a bad financial situation, a dangerous neighborhood etc. Imagine you live in a neighborhood where people have guns and actually use them. Wouldn't you be a bit stressed out and thus being more prone to make errors, communicate incorrectly, both as patient but also as nurse/doctor?

yeetawayhn 6y ago
> Imagine you live in a neighborhood where people have guns and actually use them. Wouldn't you be a bit stressed out and thus being more prone to make errors, communicate incorrectly, both as patient but also as nurse/doctor? No, have you never lived in a rural area?

ericb 6y ago

Speaking for myself, I downvoted not because you are factually wrong. I downvoted because your entire argument is whataboutism. It is irrelevant to the topic being discussed, and makes the entire debate worse for its presence.

Bancakes 6y ago
Giving any sort of context in order to destroy FUD is now whatabautism? I guess you just have confirmation bias, huh.