Doctors' Errors and Mistakes of Medicine: Must Health Care Deteriorate?

During the last decades, healthcare in the various industrialized countries has been deteriorating steadily. The enormous progress of medicine in the same period could only partly compensate for the loss. This book describes the deterioration of healthcare that increases continually. It analyses its causes and outlines the measures that might prevent or at least slow the change. The deterioration of healthcare, variable in different fields, progressing at different paces in the various industrialized countries, is produced mainly by two types of causes. Minor ones, resulting from lack of knowledge, or by inadequate equipment or procedures, can be corrected by relatively simple means, such as education and technical or procedural improvements. The major causes for the deterioration involve general policy whose effects are the steady decrease in monitoring health care and the change of healthcare into profit-seeking service. The data collected and its analysis is based on over 300 articles in major medical and nursing journals. It has three parts: part 1 deals with individual doctors' errors, part 2 with errors of the medical establishment, and part 3 is devoted to more theoretical and philosophical discussions concerning medical practice as a clinical science.