Why are people so concerned about medical errors?

Dr. Salman Muhammad Saeed Al-Riyadh Every day we read about medical errors in newspapers and hear people talk about them when they meet one another. Medical errors never fail to be a hot topic for many. If a group of people meet at a gathering and start talking about medical errors and a doctor happens to be present, they will start bombarding him with questions and point fingers at him as if he were the one who had caused the error that might have cost someone’s life. Why do people not talk about the errors of civil engineers, for example? If an engineer were to make a mistake in the design of a building, the result could be catastrophic and hundreds of innocent people could be killed. Yet, we do not hear people bring up this topic at work, in schools, or at social gatherings, not even in the media. On the contrary, if a doctor makes a small medical error while trying to save a patient’s life, he will be grilled and badly treated by the general public. I would like to focus on a trend that has swept through our Arab society. We see many people going to clinics and asking doctors to perform surgery when they are not in need of these procedures. In other words, they are fine and require no treatment. I think we all remember the story of the famous Egyptian actress Suad Nasr who passed away in 2007. Nasr went to a private hospital in Egypt for liposuction and fell into a coma as a result of being administered an extra dose of anesthesia. She remained in this state for a full year until she passed away. It was a sad story. We see a lot of young women undergo plastic surgery. These operations need general anesthesia and sometimes, if the dose is too high, the patient falls into a coma and never recovers. We also see young women follow rigid regimes to lose weight and follow in the footsteps of global beauty models and end up anorexic. Let us not forget that those women pay a lot of money for these procedures.