In New Zealand, the rate of medical errors is high enough to be labeled "disturbing" by researchers.

In the study, 750 patients from New Zealand were compared with similar groups in Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States.

Results indicated that one in four New Zealanders who suffered with serious health problems were victims of medical error.

Those who had been to five or more physicians, about one-third of the group, had the most problems. Conflicting advice from physicians was one of the most common problems among this group.

Other patients reported having to take duplicate tests and poor coordination of care. Additionally, some patients who were taking several different prescription drugs said that their treatments had not been reviewed by their physicians recently.

According to the study, one of the biggest problems identified is when people are seeing multiple physicians for different health problems.

The other countries in the study had similar rates of medical error.

Stuff.co.nz May 8, 2003

Medical error in this story, as is typical, refers to such things as: duplicate tests, unnecessary drug prescription, poor coordination of care, and receiving conflicting advice from several doctors.

The study referred to in this story was conducted by the Harvard School of Medicine on behalf of the Commonwealth Fund and surveyed 750 patients.

However, medical error likely occurs more often than the usual studies reveal because the research is far too narrow and does not take into account the day-to-day gaps in care that occur in various medical settings, particularly in hospitals.

I'm referring here, for example, to lack of proper diagnosis and monitoring of very ill patients on an ongoing basis because of inadequate nursing staff or the unavailability of doctors who play a game of "laissez-faire" with their patients.

Among the omissions: patients end up with lung problems because they were not given chest X-rays in a timely fashion. What do we call that? I call that a medical error.

My point is that if thorough research zeroed in on gaps in care, the rate of medical error would not only be "disturbing" as the Harvard study suggests, but rather the research would reveal huge holes in conventional medicine that lead to widespread chronic illness and needless deaths.

The current conventional medical system hides behind simplistic and narrow studies of medical errors. The word "nightmare" would probably loom large if appropriate studies of gaps in care were ever conducted.