Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes

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."

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.

Robert M. Wachter, MD, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), is Chief of the Medical Service at UCSF Medical Center (one of U.S. News & World Report's "Top 10 Hospitals in America") and founding chair of UCSF's Patient Safety Committee. He was the first elected president of the Society of Hospital Medicine, and has published over 100 scholarly articles on topics ranging from patient safety to the organization of hospital care. He is lead editor of the two major academic series on medical errors in the U.S. (Quality Grand Rounds and AHRQ WebM&M), and also edits the popular textbook Hospital Medicine.

Kaveh G. Shojania, MD, assistant professor of medicine at UCSF, is a clinician, teacher, and researcher whose focus is on improving hospital quality and patient safety. He was lead editor of the influential federal report Making Healthcare Safer: A Critical Analysis of Patient Safety Practices, and is associate editor of Quality Grand Rounds and AHRQ WebM&M. He received the 2002 Young Investigator Award of the Society of Hospital Medicine.