>I don't think they are talking about actual malpractice, but rather
>just mistakes that were made. It often gets listed as "complications"
>and doesn't appear in any "official" tally as near as I can tell.
But that is quite misleading. Medicine is more of an art than exact science - patients do not come to doctors with lables of their illnesses attached to their foreheads. Diagnosis is a complicated, often trial and an error, process. What is more, different people react differently to treatments. It is thus very unreasonable to expect a doctor to "fix" a patient in the same way as a mechanic fixes your car. Such things happen only in politics and economics, whose practitioners are always cocksure what the problem is and how it should be fixed.
Another issue - what are the doctors compared to - newage quacks, chiropractors, counselors or psychic advisors? The science vs. sorcery issue notwithstanding, that is not a fair comparison, because medical practitioners tend to get sicker patients whose chances for a recovery are often not very good to begin with. By contrast, newage quacks, counselors and chiropractors tend to get patients who are not really ill, but merely frustrated or bored with their lives (which may be reflected as psycho-somatic ailments). So the fact that the latter's tretament result in fewer deaths simply reflects diffrent initial probabilities of dying, and not the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the treatment.
Of course that does not mean that there are not incompetent, or arrogant asshole doctors - or that no doctors put profits before their patients' health - but that is an altogether different issue. However, KPFK, WBAI and other 'alternative' stations thrive on feeding newage health witchcraft to their post-yuppie audiences, and that witchcraft often involves conventional medicine bashing.
wojtek