Maybe you should read the study to find out. Among the interesting tid-bits provided by ” Doctors for Integrity in Research & Public Policy” is this:

The victim disarmament lobby wants us to believe that it is dangerous to resist crimes like rape and assault using a gun — but USING A GUN IS ACTUALLY SAFER THAN NOT RESISTING OR RESISTING WITH LESS POWERFUL MEANS. Defense with a gun results in fewer injuries (17%) than resisting with less powerful means (knives, 40%; other weapon, 22%; physical force, 51%; evasion, 35%; etc.) and in fewer injuries than not resisting at all (25%).

When a victim is successful in repelling a crime, the victim is unlikely to report the crime, leaving police to deal only with the unsuccessful attempts to defend oneself. Since police are exposed to a skewed sample of failure, they can honestly, though incorrectly, conclude that it is dangerous to attempt to defend oneself with a gun, the so-called “Police Chief’s Fallacy” named after the former San Jose, CA Police Chief Joseph McNamara, a vocal gun prohibitionist. (emphasis added)

I think that sentence I’ve emphasised should be taken as authoritative speculation. After all, it was written by a doctor who’s for integrity in research and public policy.

“Guns are used defensively by good people 1 to 2.4 million times every year — lives saved, injuries prevented, medical costs saved, and property protected…

…50 to 75 lives are saved by a gun for every life lost to a gun�

How do we know for sure who the ‘good people’ are? Based on the figures given, perhaps the ’study’ was simply measuring the number of US casualties versus Iraqi casualties since 2003.

Also, did the ’study’ do a further breakdown of the results, and analysis how many ‘good people’ were saved by the defensive use of crossbows, machine guns, cannon fire, rocket launchers and flame throwers?

FWIW: (US figures)

“Guns are used defensively by good people 1 to 2.4 million times every year — lives saved, injuries prevented, medical costs saved, and property protected…

…50 to 75 lives are saved by a gun for every life lost to a gun”

http://www.gunsandcrime.org/suter-fa.html

That sounds like a good case for banning doctors and shutting hospitals, to save lives……and save money….lots of it.

By the way this post only references mistakes made by surgeons, the major cause of unexpected death in hospital is picking up secondary infections from other patients/unsterilised equipment.

These “hospital acquired infections” kill around 90,000 people a year in the US, according to this article.

Guns, in comparison, kill about 30-35,000 per year in the US, which has the highest gun death rate of any developed country except South Africa.

The figures for England are even worse.

I`d say … -42?

So we probably shouldn’t replace all our doctors with guns then…

Mohamed Haneef was released on $10,000 bail this morning but Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews said the doctor had been taken into detention in Brisbane and will be transferred to the Villawood detention centre.

Haneef is still innocent in the eyes of the law but Mr Andrews said he was satisfied the Indian-born doctor had failed the “character test”.

Nobody told his lawyer either

Haneef’s solicitor, Peter Russo, was walking into the entrance of the Brisbane watchhouse to talk to his client about what he thought would be Haneef’s imminent release on bail when Mr Andrews called his news conference in Canberra.

Details of the minister’s announcement came a surprise.

What a great day for Australia.

The second is that we wouldn’t be having this discussion if it weren’t for openness [of the medical profession].

I don’t think that is right either historically or even today.

I’d say the main factors in comparative openness today are patient and family, i.e. citizenry pressure, nurses and their unions and government reponse in the form of health complaint tribunals and the like.

I wonder when the Government will hop into those union thugs at the AMA?

Or the Chambers of Commerce, or the Chambers of Commerce and Industries, or . . .

But patient deaths from medical mistakes are simply a predictable and not infrequent outcome of human praxis within a system that is under resourced and over-challenged, not least scientifically.
MayS

Complicating the stats some more, I think some highly skilled doctors could possibly have higher iatrogenic patient death rates, as they are prepared to take on difficult patients with conditions no-one else will touch, so rather than succumbing to disease, the death may be recorded as complications of surgery.
sublime cowgirl

Gonna have to agree with those two points, and stick up for medicos here. Any comparison between recreational shooters and the medical system is utterly ridiculous and frankly offensive.

Another piece of idiocy frequently thrown about is that the death rates in hospitals go down when doctors go on strike. Well, duh. If elective procedures (at least elective in the short-term) are not being performed then the death rate will go down. For a while. But, if the doctors remain on strike, then after a while it will start rising and keep rising to way above the normal (pre-strike) levels. And the elective work not done will compound in seriousness, and be much harder (and more expensive) to fix when they do return to work.

As also pointed out by someone, the medical profession is well aware of the problem and trying to do something about it, but it is a very difficult issue and the answer does not lie entirely with them. One of the major hurdles is the very real fear of being unreasonably sued into non-practice, and the solution to that lies as much with legislators, lawyers, and the general public as with the health system itself.

Disclaimer: I am not a medico, nor their biggest fan, but know a bit more about the inside workings of medicine and medical science than your average koala.

One notable paragraph about the statistics in the report:

The value in reporting sentinel events is not in enumerating the events and, indeed, ‘true’ rates of adverse events are unlikely to be discoverable with certainty. A traffic analogy illustrates this point. If 1000 speeding tickets were issued on one day in a city, this does not mean that only 1000 motorists were speeding on that day. Nor does it mean that twice as many motorists were speeding on that day, if 2000 tickets were issued because of a blitz on detecting speeding. The same is true of adverse event reporting.