Aaron Hartman, MDFunctional Medicine Specialist | Clinical Researcher

The 3rd Leading Cause of Death is Not What You Think...

7 Apr 2025 · 1 min

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Aaron Hartman, MD (speaker) states that "medical error"—as described in a 2016 title claiming it is the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—is a long-standing and serious problem. He defines medical error to include misdiagnosis, medication complications, surgical complications, and downstream hospital-acquired conditions; frames it as preventable harms tied to clinical care and emphasizes the physician duty "do no harm." The speaker references analyses drawing on Harvard studies and Medicare actuary data (no numeric counts presented in this chunk).

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Medical error, the third leading cause of death in the United States is the title published in 2016. So this information is not even it's not even new information. It's medical error. Now, the article is really interesting and actually is pulling some data from some studies from Harvard. It's looking at a lot of Medicare actuaries, looking at hospitalizations and things like that. But medical error, what is medical error? Medical error is misdiagnosis. Medical error is medication complications, side effects from surgeries. You know, you get hip replacement surgery, you get a kidney infection, you get a lung infection, you get hospitalized and you get hip fracture, and you die related to that. But the point is things doctors do, I tell patients I am the third most common cause of death in their country. You know, the mantra, first and foremost, do no harm is a very real thing.