[MandoMan]

I have huge respect for physicians—the vast majority who are good ones. Not for the bad ones. The worst are those selling pain pills of various sorts to drug addicts. These people make possible the deaths of many thousands of people a year. However, there are also many people who sue doctors because of a bad result, and there are thousands of lawyers who make their wealth trying to make doctors look guilty of things they didn’t do. I spent two years as an operating room scrub tech in top hospitals in Colorado and California. I scrubbed on over a thousand surgeries. I only recall seeing one case of malpractice (a general surgeon trying to do a hip pinning). (I’m not counting the famous gynecologist who, after a c-section, swing the placenta around his head by the umbilical cord as if it were a lariat, hollering like a cowboy, leaving a trail of blood on the walls around the room. The patient and anesthesiologist had already left, so no one was harmed.)

In 1974-75 I was an operating room supervisor in a hospital in Rwanda. I’ve written about it in my recent book “They Don’t Eat Missionaries Anymore.” One doctor I worked with sewed the intestines into the incision of two patients in six weeks without my noticing. The patients died after he left. Was it murder? Not really. Should he have noticed? Definitely. He now lives in south Florida, and according to the DEA, holds the U.S. record in most pain pills purchased for redistribution: 1,960,000 pills! So, have people died because of his prescriptions or pills sold to make him wealthy? I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess hundreds have died thanks to him. Are these lives that matter?

Originally Posted by GoodLife

So we had a black man who was killed during an arrest by Police. This led to huge protests/riots/arson.looting all over the country.

So I looked at the numbers, and thought, what other professions kill unarmed civilians, by mistake or on purpose?

According to the Washington Post database, a total of 41 unarmed people were shot and killed by US police in 2019. The racial composition of victims is:

White: 19
Black: 9
Hispanic: 6
Other: 4
Unknown: 3
Total 41

In some of these cases Police were charged and tried, others were ruled justifiable.

According to the DOJ Police have more than 50 million encounters with citizens every year, traffic stops, domestic violence, burglaries etc etc. Any of these encounters can turn violent. Of course you would like for the number to be zero, but Police killings of unarmed citizens are statistically insignificant compared to the number of encounters.

So chance of unarmed civilian being killed by Police = 41/50,000,000 = 0.00000082

In 1999, the Institute of Medicine published the famous “To Err Is Human” report, which dropped a bombshell on the medical community by reporting that up to 98,000 people a year die because of mistakes in hospitals. The number was initially disputed, but is now widely accepted by doctors and hospital officials — and quoted ubiquitously in the media. More recent studies estimate the number is now more than 200,000 per year.

How Many Die From Medical Mistakes in U.S. Hospitals? — ProPublica

Average number of hospitalizations per year in US is 36,000,000

so chance of being killed by medical error is 200,000/36,000,000 = 0.00555

A small chance, but much much larger than Police chance

You can say well Doctors don't kill people on purpose, these are mistakes. Same can be said for Police, in a few cases they might be convicted of murder, but mostly they are ruled as manslaughter or excessive use of force. If Police really wanted to kill a lot of people of any race they could, they are armed and good shots. The miniscule numbers of this actually happening are statistically insignificant.

Do Doctors ever kill on purpose? Unfortunately they do.

Ohio doctor charged with 25 counts of murdering patients with fatal doses of fentanyl.
His trial has been delayed because of covid, so we will see what a jury says about this.
That's just one Doctor who killed more than 50% of what Police did last year.

How many Doctors go to jail every year for malpractice or murder? Do they avoid prosecution because their insurance pays out large sums?

To err is human for some but not all?