Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

by Nicholas A. Christakis MD PhD

Overall, possibly as many as 1 percent of patients admitted to American hospitals die from a medical mistake!47 Doctors know this. When I was doing my medical internship at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in Philadelphia in 1989, a senior doctor advised the new interns to think carefully before admitting patients: “Hospital admission is not a benign procedure,” he cautioned. Americans often equate more with better when it comes to medicine, but much data suggest otherwise. One way to assess the potentially deadly impact of health care is to look at what happens when doctors go on strike. This is a rare event, but an analysis of five strikes by physicians around the world, occurring between 1976 and 2003 and lasting between nine days and seventeen weeks, showed that, overall, mortality either stayed the same or declined during the strike.48 Possible explanations for a decrease in mortality include a delay in elective surgeries (with their attendant risks) and a decline in medical errors and injuries. What about other times when doctors are relatively unavailable? One study examined mortality among elderly Americans who had heart attacks or heart failure and were hospitalized during the two annual national cardiology conferences (when fewer cardiologists were available to treat them) over the course of ten years. The study found that, of the tens of thousands of patients with heart failure who were admitted during meeting days (when they were cared for by docto...