Health

Autopsy

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 31, 2002 / 8:40 AM EST / CBS

If you really want to know why someone close to you died, ask for an autopsy. But in recent decades, the autopsy rate in our hospitals has plummeted. They’re not cheap — they cost around $2000 — but is there more to it than that?

Are Doctors Burying Their Mistakes?

"About 40% of the time in hospital deaths in America, across the board, the clinical doctor gets the cause of death flagrantly wrong, or there is a serious mistake in what is listed as the cause of death," says Dr. George Lundberg, former editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Without autopsies many of these mistakes go unnoticed by hospitals and doctors. "Some doctors, some medical staffs, are afraid to find out what happened in people who died," says Lundberg.

Ohio Study

60 Minutes did its own first of its kind computer analysis of over 320,000 deaths in the state of Ohio. The Ohio state autopsy rate is 8 _ percent. Several hospitals in the study did not perform a single autopsy in 1996, the most recent year available. Half a century ago, the autopsy rate would have been around 50 percent. Dr. Donald Thomas of the L.A. County Hospital System says, "Doctors don’t like to ask for them. You don’t like to walk up to somebody whose family just died and ask them can you vivisect the body. It’s not a popular thing to do." But Dr. Lundberg found the low rate of autopsies in Ohio "dreadful." "A lot of clinical doctors began to think that they didn’t need the autopsy anymore because they had fancy lab tests, imaging devices, all sorts of new technology that would answer all those questions," says Dr. Lundberg. "And in theory, they were largely right. But in practice, they’ve never been right. You look at specifically the last 40 years, decade by decade, and the frequency with which the cause of death is erroneously diagnosed by the clinical doctor has changed little."

Medical Errors

In fact medical errors may be up. Just this year, the Institute of Medicine, an affiliate of the National Academy of Sciences, has said that the number of fatal medical mistakes in America’s hospitals may be even greater than anyone realized, up to 100,000 a year.