The Vigilant Fox
@VigilantFox
Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman look up how many Americans die from medical error each year, and the answer floors them both. ROGAN: “Okay, so medical error is responsible for 251,000 deaths a year.” HUBERMAN: “Whoa, that’s crazy.” ROGAN: “Do you understand how insane that is? Imagine if that was Pop-Tarts.”
That number comes from a 2016 Johns Hopkins study published in the BMJ. It estimated medical errors kill 251,454 Americans a year, which makes them the third leading cause of death, behind only heart disease and cancer. And it gets worse. A 2023 Johns Hopkins and Harvard study found that misdiagnosis alone kills an estimated 371,000 Americans a year and leaves another 424,000 permanently disabled.
If an airline killed that many people, nobody would ever board a plane again.