Each year doctors and nurses kill nearly one hundred thousand Americans. By mistake.
They operate on the wrong patients, prescribe the wrong drugs, and leave instruments
inside body cavities after surgery. Meanwhile, hospitals spend billions on new
gadgets, marble lobbies, and slick billboards even as safety continues to be ignored.
Until now.
Internal Bleeding exposes the dark secrets behind the glistening facade of modern medicine. Doctors
Robert Wachter and Kaveh Shojania, professors at one of America's leading medical
schools and two of the world's foremost authorities on medical mistakes, shatter
the silence to tell the dramatic and compelling stories of real patients betrayed
by a system they trusted to save them.
Through these stories, the authors reveal the inner workings, gut-wrenching dilemmas,
and heartbreaking tragedies of our overburdened, understaffed health care system.
Internal Bleeding provides an insider's view of how professional caregivers think, feel, and operate-facts
that every patient and family must know to avoid becoming just another "mistake."
In the groundbreaking tradition of Fast Food Nation, Internal Bleeding paints a vivid and unforgettable picture of a system gone terribly wrong, and
what doctors, nurses, hospital CEOs, and policy makers must do to make it right.
Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes