American science and public health is the finest in the world, with the smartest people working with the latest technologies to prevent and cure disease. We are exceptional.

That is a common belief held by several million people working within the medical industrial complex. The problem is, it’s untrue. In fact, it’s just the opposite. American medicine kills more people unnecessarily than any other national medical system in the industrialized world. As Harvard School of Medicine professor Lucian Leape noted, American medicine kills 3 jumbo jets-worth of patients every 48 hours.(1)

In this series we review the startling science which suggests that deaths from medical error in the US may be conservatively estimated at 400,000 annually, while severe injuries from medical error may top 10,000,000.(2,3) This equates to 8 million deaths and 200,000,000 severe injuries due to modern medical medicine during the past twenty years. It is higher than the casualties from any single conflict or war in American history.