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New Study Finds More Post-Surgery Deaths Globally Than From HIV, Tuberculosis and Malaria Combined (upi.com)
schwit1 shares a report from UPI: About 4.2 million people worldwide die every year within 30 days of surgery -- more than from HIV, tuberculosis and malaria combined, a new study reports. The findings show that 7.7 percent of all deaths worldwide occur within a month of surgery, a rate higher than that from any other cause except ischemic heart disease and stroke. "Although not all postoperative deaths are avoidable, many can be prevented by increasing investment in research, staff training, equipment and better hospital facilities," lead author of the study, Dr. Dmitri Nepogodiev, said in a university news release. Along with finding that 4.2 million people a year die within a month of having surgery, his team discovered that half of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries.
"Although not all postoperative deaths are avoidable, many can be prevented by increasing investment in research, staff training, equipment and better hospital facilities," Nepogodiev said in a university news release. "To avoid millions more people dying after surgery, planned expansion of access to surgery must be complemented by investment in to improving the quality of surgery around the world," he noted.
"Although not all postoperative deaths are avoidable, many can be prevented by increasing investment in research, staff training, equipment and better hospital facilities," Nepogodiev said in a university news release. "To avoid millions more people dying after surgery, planned expansion of access to surgery must be complemented by investment in to improving the quality of surgery around the world," he noted.
... romans, Creimette...
20% of people who are expected to die will undergo some type of surgery to buy time
100% of people die within a few days of drinking water.
Compared to what? What's the number for people who die within 30 days of not having medically necessary surgery? I'm pretty sure people consider the risks pretty carefully before opting for surgery.
And yes, spending more money generally correlates with improved outcomes, but if it's not quantitative then it's not telling us anything new.
We are given these numbers without useful context - only a meaningless comparison to the total deaths caused by several historically scary diseases.
Taken as a group, surgical patients will probably be sicker, on average, than the population as a whole. What are the measured mortality rates per type of surgery? What are the expected mortality rates of these patients, both with and without surgical intervention? What is the total number of surgeries involved?
#DeleteChrome
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Medicine remains seriously adverse to inexpensive immune and nutritional methods that can make huge differences in surgical recovery and complications.
The recent "discovery" that vitamin B1+hydrocortisone+a little injected vitamin C can prevent and abort sepsis is a small, belated step in the right direction. Big Medicine is still way behind on injectable vitamin C technology though.
I suspect that increasing investment in research, staff training, equipment and better hospital facilities aren't really going to have that much impact because usually when you need surgery, you are pretty fucked up already.
This is nothing more than shilling for more cash.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
This is one of the reasons why our medical system is so out of control. They routinely do complex surgeries on very, very old people who will never regain a quality of life. It doesn't matter at all that Great-Granddad is 97...let's go ahead with that heart bypass surgery.
Most people who need surgery have a medical condition in the first place. I suppose the study could be done again, with the surgery performed on perfectly healthy people, to get better data
"half of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries"
Which strongly suggests that half of them die in high income countries. Countries which typically have a smaller population. Which suggests that a larger proportion of high income people are dying after their surgery.
Hey, I'm talking about US, people! Tech workers, managers, skilled mathematicians and undertakers and other people who help maintain our countries' high incomes. Are we gonna stand for this death rate? We need to protest! Or move to a low-income country where surgery is safer.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I think although not all postoperative deaths are avoidable, many can be prevented by increasing investment in research, staff training, equipment and better hospital facilities.
And, I believe that although not all postoperative deaths are avoidable, many can be prevented by increasing investment in research, staff training, equipment and better hospital facilities.
What percentage of these deaths could have been avoided if we detected the condition requiring surgery before it was too late and were forced to move from relatively non-invasive operations or even medication to requiring surgery?
My theory... of which I recently signed up for the university to work towards a masters and Ph.D. in the topic is to detect maladies before they reach the point of requiring complex surgery. This comes from automating advanced medical practices and eliminating the simple ones. For example, instead of having a general practitioner stick his finger up your ass to check for lumps... what's the frigging point... if you have a lump big enough that he can feel it, we detected it far too late. It should have been detected before it ever formed.
So, the solution is to employ modern full body layered ultrasound (or alternative techniques... that's what I hope to study) to identify the problems long before they become lumps that you could feel. If a doctor is looking for lumps, it's because we only visit a doctor once a year and we might already be 80% of the way to detectable which is 150% of the way to "this is bad" but we'll wait an entire extra year before checking again.
If we look for tumors, oddities in circulation, etc... by simply scanning the body and looking inside, we can do this using machine and do this several dozen times a year as the cost would be minimal following the initial capital expenditure. The machine would be reminiscent of an airport body scanner and already exists (there was a story on Slashdot not long ago). By reducing the cost of such machine that initially all larger companies would install them in each campus as a replacement for security doors.. not all doors, just as a voluntary option, a person could walk through twice a day if they wanted and if machine detects anything suspicious, they will receive a text message with a recommended appointment at a specialist.
Once we use the wealthy as guinea pigs, we can mass produce them and deploy them in offices and schools across the world. They should work everywhere except the U.S. which has ridiculous problems with things like health care because the American people would rather die than cooperate with one another.
This is why I avoid the medical profession in general. They're idiots. The odds of finding anyone in the world that is not only good but cares about their job is one in ten million at best. Most people mostly care about money, not intelligence. Good fucking luck.
I'm vindicated.
I always said surgeons are just high paid butchers.
They treat the symptoms by cutting it out, not the causes.
Bit pythonesque
no fecking science involved, just trial and error.
Go well
I don't get it. "Surgeries" are treatment attempts for a myriad kind of different things. The attempt might be successful, or it might not, and the first days after the procedure are usually critical. In all, every surgery comes with a mortality rate that may be from very low to very high.
So, I would definitely expect deaths in the first month after surgery to be quite a high number given the number of surgeries happening around the world - I mean if there weren't many, we'd have solved most health issues "hey, just have a surgery, nobody dies after one". Yeah investment in research will help saving lives, but the same can be said about virtually any sector of medicine.
A few hundred million apparently. So chances of dying after surgery is getting close to 1% within 30 days.
More slashdot sensationalism.
The sumary says "half of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries"
Doesn't that mean half of those happen in rich countries? Why are they trying to shame low and middle income countries when the rate in rich countries is so high?
In time, you may change your tune a bit once you personally know someone who goes into surgery and never wakes up.
Especially something ridiculously simple and / or routine.
No words can explain how you feel when you meet the Doctor and are expecting to hear one thing ( we're done, they're doing fine, etc. )
only to find out they coded on the table and the surgical team spent the last half hour trying to revive them to no avail.
The truly frustrating part is not knowing why.
Body just give up ? Medical / Anesthesia error ? Reaction to one of the meds ?
It's one of those things that will haunt you forever.
Having surgery is not a disease, yet they compare it to disease death rates? Let's compare apples to toaster ovens!
"Or move to a low-income country where surgery is safer."
No, they just won't bother cutting open grandpa for a liver blood clot because he's already old and probably won't survive the procedure so its not worth the money, let him die with his family. Whereas in rich countries, grandpa has the money, lets milk him till he's a corpse!
Look, I'm expecting the US to correlate *BETTER* on this, because most of you cannot afford your healthcare, and so you probably won't get cut open for last chance operations, so compared to say Sweden, you probably won't get surgery and will just die without it.
I assume the figures show that?
... die. More news at 11.
Find people who can study. Accept only the best people for medical work.
Make sure they can all pass their tests.
Ensure they can function in a teaching hospital with constant peer review.
Stop accepting average and mediocre students.
Make sure your nations has the best professionals every decade.
A doctor wants to work in your nation with no qualifications?
Make them pass the same standard exams before they are allowed in.
Peer review will then find the people who cant learn, who cant study, who cant keep up.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
"Find people who can study." You are too stupid to exist.
You misspelled Clinton
Reminds me of a quote supposedly given by Willie Sutton, a notorious bank robber. When asked why he robbed banks, he replied "because that's where the money is."
Why do people die in hospitals? Because that's where sick people go. Why do people die after surgery? Because one, surgery carries a certain risk. Two, if they are doing surgery on you, there's probably something wrong with you to begin with.
There are absolutely problems with secondary infections, surgical errors, unnecessary surgeries and the like. but a single statistic doesn't say anything about those things.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I often say a great doctor kills more people than a great general.
-- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 - 1716)
What they didn't note was the incidence of hospital-acquired infections. This may not be directly related to surgery itself, but it's certainly directly related to being hospitalized. Far too many hospital stays are made longer than expected due to nosocomial infections. Those that go home but return soon with infections from organisms typically found in hospital settings should also be included. I know this personally, I was hospitalized for a couple of days, for minor surgery, and had to return the next morning due to a high fever. I was in that nasty place for two more weeks with sepsis. I like hospitals, but I don't like hospitals. I'll go home ASAP when the doc says go.
The point is that there's more to the story. It's not all surgical errors. Hospitals are -nasty- places. They're filled with sick people, overburdened staff, even the orderlies(typically understaffed) that clean the place are barely able to keep up with things. The nursing staff and physicians do not always use a simple hand cleaner, one of the worst problems. I understand, of course, they're juggling a thousand things and trying eagerly to give us the best care, but hand-washing has yet to become automatic. Yes, most do it by rote, but still infection spreads.
So keep in mind that less-than-optimal outcomes and hospital readmittances will continue to happen, and what's really needed is more staff, better cleanliness, and facilities equipment and fixtures are made of or coated with things that are naturally germicidal.
Perfectly healthy people rarely pop into a hospital for a surgery, so a study based on that would have very little volume and just by this alone would be a stupid idea
I'm a Type 1 diabetic. I've had a number of occasions where hospitals seemed quite intent on killing me. It's a long story, decades back Mass. General Hospital had me on Demerol after a broken leg so I wasn't coherent enough to correct their treatment. They'd measure my high blood sugar, let the doctor know eventually, who'd order more tests which would come back in the next shift whence the next doctor would order more tests. I was in ketosis for *4 days*. Not the modest, healthy ketosis because you eat no carbs, the lethal ketosis because you don't have enough insulin to use glucose, you burn protein instead, and it makes your blood more acid. That can kill you. So can potassium depletion, and kidney failure from such mishandling.
I've also learned a harsh lesson, from several emergency room occasions. (50 years of Type 1, yeah, I've been in an ER a few times.) If you take the IV out and head for the door, a doctor *will* finally see you. It is *embarrassing* if you escape from an ER without a physician ever seeing you, they can't bill for it.
Wow amazing groupthink and confirmation biases going on.
Yes some surgical procedures are considered elective and/or cosmetic. The majority of surgical procedures are done on patients who can see death in their rear view mirror. As a resident ER physician, the patients I send for surgery have an illness or injury that meets these criteria: Sudden, acute, unexpected, and so catastrophic that the odds of them surviving to the end of my shift is approximately 0.
Most of these surgeries "succeed". It's the end of my shift, and I can still hear their heart beating in my ears through my stethoscope. If surgery had not been done, I'd hear only silence (not to mention the strange looks I'd get for examining a corpse in a body bag).
Most of these patients will be reported as "in stable but critical condition". This is medical code for "in a post-surgical coma, in the ICU, where machines are working 24/7 to do the job of the vital organs that no longer function after the extensive damage that occurred in those crucial minutes before surgery began (911 call, waiting for EMS, en route to hospital, freeway traffic jams, triage, physician assessment, CT scans, intubation, anaesthesia induction, surgical team scrubbing in). Many of these people will go on to die within 30 days. That is a miracle of modern medicine, not a failure, because 30 days sure beats the 30 minutes they may have lived after their massive heart attack or head-on high speed motor vehicle collision. Even if they never wake up, those 30 days buys their family an opportunity to say goodbye and come to terms with losing their loved one. It allows organs to be harvested used to save the lives other others through transplant surgery. And sometimes, they will wake up, and go on to recover sufficiently to resume lives that would have otherwise ended prematurely, if not for a surgical intervention.
The correct interpretation of this study is NOT 7.7% of death is caused by surgery, but rather "7.7% of dying people attempt to cheat death with surgery fail, and die anyways".
Why post to a site providing no source for claims?
Who would have thunk that sick people that require surgery might be in high risk of dying?
Drug-resistant infections are making hospitals a really dangerous place to be.
You've won the irony of the day award.
I don't agree.
I had a major surgery, planned a couple of months in advance. I was in a good condition, but if I didn't have the surgery, then it would have led to a serious condition later on. I was not "pretty fucked up".
One week after being released from hospital, I went back to the hospital's ER, due to pain and fluid leaking from the closed incision. The doctor on duty gave me a prescription for strong pain killers and sent me away.
3 days later, I was back in the same ER. A more experienced doctor knew what was wrong, and proceeded to pump out of me over a pint of smelly fluid. He also contacted one of the surgical team, who ordered tests and a CAT scan. I was admitted back into the hospital and given a course of the strongest antibiotics they had via IV. If I hadn't gone back in to the ER when I did, there was a good change I would have died.
The surgeon told me that when I first visited the ER, they should have contacted her and let her examine me. This appeared to be a standard procedure but the working doctor was not aware of this.
In my case, better training would have prevented an almost fatal outcome.
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName
Oh, there something we found but we're really not sure what's causing it but the solution is to throw money at it and it will be all better.
It says on your chart, your fucked up. You talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded.
Yes, Humans are the number one deathcause of humans. Always has been and always will be if nothing fundamentaly changes in this species.
Well at least we don't have to worry about that anymore. Treating obvious severe pain by prescribing strong painkillers is now strictly forbidden in the ER, because some docs gave out Vicoden for a twisted ankle now you can't have them for your giant abscess in your surgical incision or any other situation that doesn't require being admitted.
Orthopedic surgeries and cosmetic surgeries. Knee scopes for acls, rhinoplasty and the like. There's plenty of data. Of course, it will confirm that sick people go to the hospital, but the data is there.
Thinking of the last 3 deaths in my family, yes, this is pretty much true. Every single one had a surgery to attempt to stop the inevitable, and every single one died within 30 days of that. I don't really fault the doctors, they told us all ahead of time that the probability of success was very low. But when you're talking about someone definitely dying, versus the chance they will not die, you take the chance they will not die.
Now throw in "world-wide" and you are also including a lot of surgeries being done in less than ideal environments with less than ideal equipment, possibly by undertrained staff, Inevitably you end up with junk. Making a decision to do surgery should definitely be informed by the risks, but those risks are not equal in a large university hospital in Washington DC versus a tent in the sahara (possibly involving Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd masquerading as a doctors to avoid blowing their cover).
I would rather hear about the number of post-surgical deaths in 30 days in 1st world countries where the patient prognosis was not terminal by qualified physicians, that's information I would consider.
You're improperly comparing to a zero base state - post-surgery death vs if the person were living a normal life and didn't need surgery. That leads you to the incorrect conclusion that "something is wrong" when someone dies after surgery.
The correct comparison is is against what would've happened to the person if they hadn't gone into surgery. Except for cosmetic surgery, going to the OR is usually to treat a life-threatening problem. 4.2 million deaths after surgery vs 313 million surgical procedures is a 1.3% chance of death post-surgery. People opt for surgery because that's a helluva improvement over the ~50% chance of death if they hadn't gone into surgery.
The same miguided argument is used against vaccines. A few dozen children die from vaccines each year. Anti-vaxxers (comparing to a zero base state of no deaths) cite that as evidence that vaccines are unsafe. But the correct comparison is a few dozen deaths from vaccines, vs the tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths if nobody were vaccinated. We opt for vaccines and surgery because they're the lesser of two evils (far, far lesser).
Another example is the crash of United Airlines 232. One of the passengers was a lap child - an infant or small child carried on the parents' lap and traveling without paying for a seat. The head stewardess abroad the flight followed procedure and instructed the parents to put the lap child underneath the seat in front of them like carry-on luggage. When the child died, she was so racked with guilt that she went on a multi-decade crusade to get lap children banned. The FAA finally ruled against her a few years ago. She was incorrectly comparing against a zero base state - the lap child dying vs possibly surviving if it had been belted into a seat. The FAA made the correct comparison. Lap children are allowed because flying is two orders of magnitude safer than driving. If you forced all parents with small children to pay for a seat for those children, a lot of them would opt to drive instead of fly. And as a result a lot more children would die from car accidents than this one lap child on this one ill-fated flight.
Instead of being frustrated over not knowing why the "unnecessary" death occurred, treat it as a gamble. The patient's original status gave him, say, a 50% chance of survival. Surgery gives him a 98.7% chance of survival. So surgery is obviously the better bet and wiser choice. But 1.3% of the time you will still lose that bet. It still boils down to the luck of the draw, except with surgery (and vaccines and lap children) you are stacking the deck far, far in your favor.
We can and certainly should try to improve the 1.3% fatality rate following surgery. But 1.3% is still a good thing, not something to be ashamed or fearful of. People are making jokes because TFA is naively trying to spin this story as if surgery were an additional risk, when it's actually a reduction in risk.
I bet a lot more lives are saved by surgery than are saved by HIV, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.
I suspect that increasing investment in research, staff training, equipment and better hospital facilities aren't really going to have that much impact because usually when you need surgery, you are pretty fucked up already.
This is nothing more than shilling for more cash.
More money is the answer to all our problems, except funding. Tax the rich is the answer to all our funding problems.
It would help if we knew what TYPE of surgeries we're talking about. I'm having gall bladder surgery later this week for instance. They say it's very routine and no big deal. But it's my first ever surgery at 60 years old and I'm nervous as hell.
As some other responses to your post have said, there's a problem with detecting too much stuff and having false, or false-ish positives.
There's a cancer researcher who has postulated that cancers show up all the time, but are mostly rejected by the immune system while still small and never really cause any problems or require any treatment.
In fact, I *think* I had a basal cell carcinoma (looked just like one, i swear) and I was on the verge of going to get it treated when it got irritated, started to bleed a bit, and then vanished over a few days. Gone. No scar. Poof. Never came back. It's been > 5 years. In my case, I would have been trading a low-risk surgery that would have left a scar with no-risk immune attack on that possible basal cell carcinoma that left no scar.
I suspect a lot of "early detections" would lead to medical interventions that caused more harm than good, and are costly. Better to put the medical resources into prenatal care and immunizations. Big bang/buck there.
Best,
--PeterM
Tell that to the 16M people who get cosmetic surgery every year â" and thatâ(TM)s just in the US.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Article does not say what the cause of the post-op deaths are. My guess, infection. A neighbor is in medicine and her greatest fear is MRSA. Hospitals are teaming with resistant bacteria all waiting to hop into a warm body. It is still better than pre-antibiotic days when surgery had much worse outcomes.
I don't agree.
I had a major surgery, planned a couple of months in advance. I was in a good condition, but if I didn't have the surgery, then it would have led to a serious condition later on. I was not "pretty fucked up".
...
So, you were in a condition where you needed to have someone literally cut you open, twist some knobs, and then sew you back together?
Sounds "pretty fucked up" to me.
Agree 100% - a gimmick article seeing more money and subsidies sent to the medial industry.
A stat like the percent of patients dying 30 days after an appendectomy or other routine surgery would be informative.
The exact percentage is unknown, but there is some percentage of doctors who don't care at all. They fill out checklists and do the bare minimum of what those checklists prescribe in order to keep themselves from being declared incompetent... but they just don't care. They were told if they do certain things in a certain order, they get money. So they do, but they don't care. Your suffering is immaterial. Your survival has no bearing on whether or not they sleep well at night. They just don't care.
You factor that in with hospitals being a concentrated warehouse storage of some of the nastiest bacteriums on this planet and... this result is expected. I would go so far as to say that it gives an upper bound on the amount of medical professionals who just don't care. If that is the case, the numbers are better than I had hoped. Maybe it is possible to find a medical professional who does more than checklists and shoulder shrugs.
Or, maybe, this result is indicative of how good those checklists are... (now I am depressed again)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Ok, AC, I'll assume that that is a real question and all you lack is a little understanding, so I'll give you an informative answer.
It's all relative and time related.
I had a potentially fatal condition, but it was not currently fatal that that moment in time. If fact, it was the complete opposite. I waited 2 months not due to a queue or waiting list, but I waited until my condition improved and I was in good health. That's the best time to operate, when someone is in good health.
Imagine if you have a swollen appendix. If it needs to be removed, you have a better chance of survival if it hasn't yet burst. If you go in for emergency surgery with a burst appendix, then you have a lower rate of survival as your body is already reacting to the condition. If it hasn't yet burst, and you are not currently suffering from pain and infection, then the surgery is less of a shock to your body.
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName