[abecode]

Actually I heard the opposite... I was a premed student and I did and internship at a hospital and one of the doctors said it's actually fairly difficult to kill someone by accident, ie you have to mess up very badly or the patient must already be gravely ill for an accident to result in death. Still, the comment implies that doctors do in fact make mistakes and it was one of the experiences I had in that internship that made me decided to switch majors.

[jajko]

Its just a number game. You see say 15 patients per day, so maybe 3000 a year. Even if you have a tiny 1% chance of overlooking something, thats 30 cases a year, easily. In a career, that jumps to 1000 cases minimally.

Now a lot of folks come to doctors with very vague problems - ie 'chest pain' is probably the worst since it can be from nothing to killer (and it really often is). Also you need to keep constantly full mental model of all the other problems of patient (allergies, injuries, degenerative diseases of literally everything in the body), plus all their medication and how it interacts with those problems and whatever new treatment you are applying. Old folks are generally worst in sense that they are just breaking down altogether including their mind, so everything is potentially a problem, but then you sometimes have very little time to decide.

Its just not possible to not make mistakes, and its only matter of time before they become fatal. But doctors will never admit this to strangers, even close ones they often keep avoiding this topic. I grok them - idealists who want to save lives, but reality ain't some MSF hospital in middle of warzone where you save 50 lives a day and people celebrate you like a national hero, its small churning of all above, tons of bureaucracy and regulations and various financial pressures, so they do their best just like rest of us, and like rest of us mistakes (even if just misunderstandings with bad consequences) do happen.