The Scary Truth About Hospital Stays

Up to 400,000 people are killed each year due to preventable medical errors.  

A new study recently released by the Journal of Patient Safety indicates that between 210,000 and 400,000 hospital patients each year suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death. This new study estimates preventable medical errors are the third leading cause of death in America, behind heart disease (1^st) and cancer (2^nd).

 $765,000,000,000, or 30% of all U.S. healthcare costs, each year is wasted.

 A 2011 Institute of Medicine (IOM) study, “The Healthcare Imperative:  Lowering Costs and Improving Outcomes,” indicated that of the $2.5 trillion spent on domestic healthcare costs in 2009, $765 billion (or 30%) was attributable to preventable costs.  These costs include fraud, unnecessary services, inefficiently delivered services, and excessive administration costs.  At the current growth rate, healthcare costs are expected to skyrocket to an unsustainable $4.5 trillion in 2019.

Waking Up During Surgery

You probably have heard of urban myths wherein a patient undergoing surgical procedures suddenly wakes up and feels the pain of being sliced open by cold, steely knives. Turns out, these aren’t legends at all and, in fact, happens quite a lot more than we want it to – which is never.

Such a phenomenon is called anaesthesia awareness, and it may happen when a certain administrative chemical that’s supposed to put you to sleep during the operation somehow doesn’t do its job, which is usually the fault of someone else who didn’t do his job properly.

Statistics indicate that this horrific incident occur .02 percent of the time, but studies show that it can go up to ten times this value. That’s a whopping 2 percent! That may sound insignificant at first, but once you take into account the thousands upon thousands of people who undergo medical surgeries, then the gravity of it all starts to loom in!

Now, there are cases and testimonies from countless people who have fallen victim to anaesthesia awareness, and a great deal of them say it was an excruciatingly painful ordeal. There are also a number of people who say that though they did not feel any pain, it was still a horrific experience to numbly feel their bodies being operated on. Of course there’s also this one case wherein a woman woke up only to realize that her eyes were being detached from her face. Yikes.

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