Another thing that can influence the stats is that an increasing number of people are living to adulthood. Premi children can be kept alive even when their systems are not fully developed. These kids reach adulthood with persistant medical issues, previously a child born with a heart problem would die, now they are generally able to keep them alive but not able to give them complete health. This is especially true with children born with severe disabilities like cerebral palsy, or victims of severe accidents. They may be alive and there-fore included in statistics, but they will suffer from proportionatly larger numbers of illnesses. Medical intervention can give them life but is not yet at the stage where quality of life can be achieved on a regular basis. By being able to save the lives of people who would otherwise not live, the medical system increases the number of people likely to become dependant upon the medical system. Genes or conditions that are detrimental to the health of a person can now be passed on because medicine allows these people to live long enough to re-produce. To be human and to believe in the right to life of other people necessitates that people are not just left to die because they are "genetically weak". It follows that a system needs to be in place to care for those people whos bodys do not function as well, and as medicine advances and more lives can be saved, the gap between saving lives and quality of life will widen. They dont always produce the best answer but hospitals have ethics comittees who evaluate the extreme cases and decide whether some procedures will negate the quality of life to the degree that it is preferable to let nature take its course. The range of illnesses and diseases that doctors face these days is far beyond those experienced 100 or even 20 yrs ago. Doctors should in theory focus on health and what promotes health, but the level of illness and disease is so high that it seems the system is just trying to stem the tide and keep its head above water. It would be great if you only needed to promote health but many many people are beyond that point and need to control or eradicate the negatives first before they can actively work towards health. A diabetic can do alot to promote their health with diet and exercise, but a juvenile diabetic who suffers from severe hypos can not work with their environment without first controlling their insulin to some degree with medicine. The medical system is full of stuff ups but you fail to mention some of the truely fantastic achievements it has made. You can be mauled by a shark and live, you can be born with a hole in your heart and it can in some cases be fixed, a child does not have to die because the umbilical cord is around their neck. Doctors stuff up and the system fails alot of people, but mabey people are asking too much of medicine. It is human trial and error with politics and money thrown into the mix, and often indaequate training and supervision, long hours, high stress and pressure from frightend people wanting instant answers and instant cures. Stomach stapeling is a shocking idea, why is medicine asked to fix over eating? If an emotional problem is causing the eating why arent they in therapy? What examples are peole setting for their children that they dont know when to stop eating or what to eat? We sue McDonalds for making us fat, we complain that teachers dont teach our children about nutrition and we ask doctors to suck out the donuts and cut our stomachs in half to prevent us doing it again! Where is the sense in that? To blame the incorrectly used medical resources and the overstretched education system is a convenient cop-out for people who dont want to put in the work for their own health and who cant be bothered teaching their children how to make their health a priority. If you eat well, get enough exercise and take care of your mental health you dont need to be at the doctor asking for drugs. The medical system needs alot of work but the thing that needs to be worked on more urgently is peoples attitude towards their bodies and their belief that medicine or drugs can repair all the damage they do to themselves. 250,000 is alot of deaths due to doctors but they were under the care of a doctor because they were not all that healthy in the first place. Would they have died anyway without medical intervention? Would they have died if they practiced a healthy lifestyle, their doctor was paid to see them for more than 15mins, the doctor in the hospital got a proper internship and wasnt asked to do 12hr shifts in an emergency ward that didnt have enough beds or nurses, and the wards were not already full of people who are there not because of an accident or unfortunate illness but because they dont look after themselves? The stats can be pretty shocking but the system cant be fixed without first looking at why the problems exist not just the number of problems.