Dispatches from the everything-you-know-is-wrong department.

Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes. ©2004, Rugged Land Books

From the publisher:

Imagine an epidemic that kills over one hundred Americans every day. Now stop imagining.

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."

Harsh. But necessary reading if you plan on getting seriously sick any time soon. Or, if you're asked to market Healthcare to a consuming public.

The writers are M.D.s--senior ones--at University of California, San Francisco Medical Center and they're surprisingly readable and very candid. Some parts aren't for the faint of heart, because the stories are about real people and you find yourself thinking: there but for the grace.... (I'll post more on my professional travels among the white coats soon.)

Rugged Land thoughtfully includes PDFs from several Appendices (hah!), covering questions you should know and ask regarding protocols, procedures and prescriptions, and how you can do better quality assurance when it comes to overseeing your family's medical care:

Dangerous Abbreviations used in prescribing

Examples of easily confused, or sound-alike drugs

A checklist and straight-talking suggestions from the authors.

If you want info on hospitals, ratings etc., try the Leapfrog Group, a healthcare advisory outfit working to improve safety here. They don't try to whitewash things: From their site:

Did you know medical mistakes in hospitals are a leading cause of death in the United States, causing more deaths each year than car accidents, breast cancer and AIDS? The good news is most medical mistakes in hospitals are avoidable - which means something can be done to prevent them. Hospitals around the country are working hard to address this problem.