Harrison Snyder, MD

@TuftsNeurosurg resident, @BYU + @MedicineUVA Grad. Lover of National Parks, music, and sports. Hater of health insurance companies. *No direct med advice*

[Harrison Snyder, MD @HSnyderMD]

People stylistically symbolize surgery with the scalpel... but surgeons know what our REAL workhorse is

[Harrison Snyder, MD @HSnyderMD]

@DrDiGiorgio This is a serious issue and needs to be discussed at our national guild of evil doctors cartel meeting next month. Sure hope someone remembers to bring chips and dip

[Harrison Snyder, MD @HSnyderMD]

@DrDiGiorgio Exactly - “well, his baseline EF is 15% and he’s on warfarin for a mechanical valve, which he last took this morning, but he fell and hit his head and now has a SDH that needs to come out. Welp, he’d bleed too much so we can’t do the surgery. ground the plane.”

[Harrison Snyder, MD @HSnyderMD]

@DrNeilStone @lanechanged I feel like they gave us many other deadlines that we’ve already passed. Meanwhile, how many unvaccinated people have died of COVID in the post-vax era?

[Harrison Snyder, MD @HSnyderMD]

@DrDiGiorgio The other big area where the airline comparisons fall apart - if ANYTHING is found to be remiss, the plane can simply… not fly… and no one dies. In medicine, inaction can be just as or more deadly than the wrong action. Sitting back and reassessing isn’t always an option

[Harrison Snyder, MD @HSnyderMD]

@DrDiGiorgio I understand the intentions behind the aviation industry comparisons - standardization can be good to help prevent errors. But as you say, it compares a human-made industry with systems that are completely understood and characterized with the millions of unknowns of medicine.

[Anthony DiGiorgio, DO, MHA @DrDiGiorgio]

This ridiculous statistic keeps appearing: medical errors are the third leading cause of death.

It is a powerful narrative that has spawned a massive quality-control bureaucracy.

It is also completely wrong.

Taking care of sick patients is not like flying an airplane. Pilots fly machines that have been maintained and cleared for takeoff. Doctors often take over when the plane is already on fire and heading toward a mountain.

Also, not every airplane is destined to crash. Yet, every patient is destined to die eventually.

When reviewers judge bad outcomes backward, they routinely classify the brutal, inevitable tradeoffs of medicine as preventable errors. Critically ill patients have more interventions and higher mortality. That does not mean an adverse event killed them, or that a new bureaucratic rule would have saved them.

The two papers often cited, one by the Institute of Medicine, another by Marty Makary, have substantial flaws. They often struggled to determine whether an adverse event actually caused the death. Shojania and Dixon-Woods, writing in BMJ Quality & Safety, criticized the “third leading cause” claim for exactly this reason. They argued that the estimate combined prior studies too simplistically, failed to follow accepted standards for quantitative synthesis, and did not adequately address whether the adverse events detected by review tools actually contributed to death.

In my latest essay, I explore how the exaggeration of preventable error has actively harmed patient care. The safety movement did not stop at identifying clear, recurring failures. It became a governing philosophy that gave administrators a moral language to control the clinical encounter.

Today, physicians spend hundreds of hours a year feeding quality metrics, hospitals game the data to manage their mortality statistics, and independent practices are crushed under the fixed costs of compliance.

When the metric becomes the target, institutions optimize for the metric. In some cases, like the push to reduce hospital readmissions, that optimization has actually caused more patients to die.

The honest path to patient safety begins by admitting that medical care involves dangerous tradeoffs, not deterministic guarantees. Read the full essay in the reply below.

[Tufts Neurosurgery @TuftsNeurosurg]

congrats to Harrison Snyder, on acceptance to his first of 2 fellowships! Dr. Snyder will complete a fellowship in open cerebrovascular & skull base microneurosurgery under the mentorship of Dr. Mustafa Başkaya & colleagues at the Univ of Wisconsin Dept of Neurological Surgery

[Harrison Snyder, MD @HSnyderMD]

@JordanAbbottMD I think we are, at our core, resistant to change. Not more than the average person is resistant to change when they’ve got a comfortable routine (it’s a human thing, not a doc thing). But you’re 100% right in your last sentence.

[Harrison Snyder, MD @HSnyderMD]

@hillraiser27 @TPP_MD Still blaming young doctors instead of the system itself. Bit of a cop out.

[Harrison Snyder, MD @HSnyderMD]

@DrDiGiorgio And a ton of older docs are blaming the younger docs, not the system that is driving this. Human beings generally respond to abuse a certain way and the response of doctors is consistent with that. Where’s the abuse coming from? We know the answer but either can’t or won’t change

[Joseph Brown @jcbmd]

@RepGregMurphy Says the guy who left clinical practice to be a politician and helps perpetuate the broken system.

Instead of criticizing admissions why don’t you pass meaningful legislation that helps fix some of the issues driving physicians out of medicine?

[Harrison Snyder, MD @HSnyderMD]

@RepGregMurphy You are getting rightfully dragged. Lecturing younger docs after you yourself left for politics of all things? Stunning hypocrisy

[Harrison Snyder, MD @HSnyderMD]

@hillraiser27 @TPP_MD Old guys have no problem blaming us. We have no problem pointing out their role in the current mess.

[Harrison Snyder, MD @HSnyderMD]

@pau67211382 @TPP_MD lol way to prove his point, you insecure ❄️

[Jimmy Turner, MD @TPP_MD]

Love the irony of the older generations of doctors (congressman included) casting judgement on younger docs for wanting out of medicine before the age of 50…

…when so much of what is wrong is because of older generations of doctors selling out medicine to get a big paycheck.

[Brent A. Williams, MD @BrentAWilliams2]

Let me give you my perspective:

We are all exhausted by the unfunded mandates and taxes on our time that increase practically monthly, and that are imposed by people that know next to nothing about healthcare.

[Tufts Neurosurgery @TuftsNeurosurg]

Welcome Nicholas Besley to our NSURG residency at TMC! Nicholas is joining us from Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine- we couldn't be more excited! #MatchDay2026 #Neurosurgery #TuftsMedicalCenter #GME #MedicalEducation #tuftsmedicine #FeinbergSchoolofMedicine

[Harrison Snyder, MD @HSnyderMD]

@DrBruggeman @DrDiGiorgio Yea, doctors doing anything is terrible, but nbd when systems buy up a bunch of hospitals and then try and “encourage” docs to refer everything within the health system 🤔

[Adam Bruggeman, MD @DrBruggeman]

Conflict of interest when physicians self-refer you say… 🤔

https://t.co/Bm0poYWxkP

[Qadi @Bigqadi]

Every time I’ve done CPR on a real woman, it felt totally different from training. our mannequins are basically all male chests. Compressions hit different anatomy. But mention that healthcare (including CPR) has long defaulted to the male (often white male) body and suddenly it’s “woke agenda” instead of a documented problem. Come on. This is about saving lives, not politics.