Ms bk

“But many were ineffective, and some highly damaging. Bloodletting, in particular, weakened patients when they were at their most vulnerable. The doctors didn’t know this for a simple but profound reason: they never subjected the treatment to a proper test—and so they never detected failure. If a patient recovered, the doctor would say: “Bloodletting cured him!” And if a patient died, the doctor would say: “He must have been very ill indeed because not even the wonder cure of bloodletting was able to save him!”

“Doctors and nurses are not, in general, dishonest people. They do not go into health care to deceive people, or to mislead them; they go into the profession to heal people. Informal studies have shown that many clinicians would willingly trade a loss of income in order to improve outcomes for patients.”

“All airplanes must carry two black boxes, one of which records instructions sent to all on-board electronic systems. The other is a cockpit voice recorder, enabling investigators to get into the minds of the pilots in the moments leading up to an accident. Instead of concealing failure, or skirting around it, aviation has a system where failure is data rich.”