Question for you........
Would you let any doctor cut you open, if you needed or required surgery?
Having a doctor from another country to just give you a check up is one thing......but when it comes to slicing you open for one reason or another.......would you allow just any ole doctor to do so?
I surely would not.
The cleanest answer is that “doctor mistakes” are usually counted as medical errors or preventable adverse events, not as a separate national death series back to 1950. The best-known U.S. estimates range from about 98,000 deaths a year in the older IOM framing to 251,454 deaths a year in a 2016 BMJ-based estimate, while later critiques argue the true number is likely lower than that upper-end claim.
What counts as a doctor mistake
Medical-error research includes diagnostic mistakes, medication errors, surgical/procedural mistakes, delayed treatment, and failures in monitoring or coordination. A Johns Hopkins summary of the BMJ estimate said many deaths were tied to poor monitoring, diagnostic errors, and surgery/procedure-related errors rather than simple “bad doctor” behavior.
Major U.S. estimates
| | | |
| IOM / To Err Is Human | 98,000 | Preventable medical errors in hospitals | |
| BMJ / James estimate | 251,454 | Deaths from medical error based on 2013 hospitalizations | |
| Higher BMJ-style extrapolation cited in later discussions | 210,000 to 440,000 | Preventable harm leading to death in hospitals | |
| More skeptical later review discussion | Lower than 440,000; exact U.S. number uncertain | Warns earlier figures were likely overstated | |
Compared with all U.S. deaths
The U.S. has about 3 million deaths per year in recent years, so even the lower 98,000 estimate is a small but serious fraction, while 251,454 would be an unusually large share of all deaths. The 251,454 figure was explicitly described as about 9.5% of all U.S. deaths in the year used in that estimate.
Surgery and medication errors
Surgical mistakes and medication mismanagement are both included under medical error, but published national numbers usually do not break deaths into those exact subtypes in a consistent yearly series. Medication errors are widely recognized as a major category of harm, and surgical errors are often described as “never events,” but national death totals for each category are not as cleanly tracked as total all-cause mortality.
Practical takeaway
If you want the narrowest defensible framing, use this: about 98,000 to 251,000-plus deaths per year have been estimated for preventable medical errors in U.S. hospitals, depending on methodology, with later scholarship cautioning that some headline estimates are probably too high.
By comparison, gun-related deaths, excluding suicide, per year go back to 1950.
Yes—gun-related deaths excluding suicide can be tracked back to 1950 much more cleanly than doctor-mistake deaths, because firearm mortality is built from official injury-death coding, while medical-error deaths are usually estimated rather than directly enumerated.
Gun deaths without suicide
For recent years, the CDC-based gun-death total includes suicides, homicides, accidents, law-enforcement deaths, and undetermined intent; if you exclude suicide, you are left with homicide plus the smaller non-suicide categories. In 2024, the CDC-based total was 44,447 gun deaths, of which 27,593 were suicides and 15,364 were homicides, so non-suicide gun deaths were about 16,854 that year.
Why 1950 is tricky
The modern CDC online firearm series is commonly available from 1968 onward, not 1950, so a true national annual series back to 1950 needs older death-certificate microdata or reconstructed historical tables. A recent half-century analysis explicitly reports annual firearm-death totals from 1968 onward, which is the kind of dataset typically used for year-by-year trend work.
Comparison with medical mistakes
Medical-mistake deaths are usually estimated at about 98,000 a year in the older IOM estimate or about 251,454 a year in the Johns Hopkins/BMJ estimate, but those are not direct annual vital-statistics counts. By contrast, gun-related deaths excluding suicide are direct injury-death counts once you define the category, and recent non-suicide firearm deaths are far lower than the largest medical-error estimates.
Best apples-to-apples framing
If your goal is a comparison table, the fairest setup is:
- Gun-related deaths excluding suicide: use CDC firearm injury mortality, preferably from 1968 onward.
- Doctor mistakes: use a chosen estimate such as 98,000 or 251,454 per year, but label it clearly as an estimate, not a count.
I can build a side-by-side timeline from 1968 to the latest available year, with gun deaths excluding suicide on one side and medical-error estimates on the other.
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So, as we all have known, it is more dangerous to vist your doctor than to own or live in a country that permits gun ownership.
