Joan Rivers' untimely death caused by an endoscopy exam that went wrong brings to light a problem that is often discounted or ignored — those procedures are definitely not free of risk. As a news reporter commented, approximately 1 in 10,000 such procedures results in the death of the patient. While those are pretty decent odds, they certainly are not negligible, especially if you or someone you know is an unfortunate victim. After all, 1 in 10,000 is equivalent to 10 in 100,000, and up until only a few years ago, it was claimed that the incidence of MC was somewhere in that range. So the doctors labeled the disease as "rare", based on those statistics. But it turns out that MC is not rare at all. It's more common than Crohn's disease and UC put together, and even more common than celiac disease.
So I can't help but wonder if medical statistics on the risks of death associated with such procedures might be just as inaccurate. It's very likely that the cause of death in many such situations is probably attributed to other causes. No doctor likes to record that he or she killed/lost a patient during a procedure, so it's very likely that "natural" causes are listed as the cause of death in many cases, and I would guess that coroners doing autopsies are very likely to go along with that unless evidence to the contrary is compelling (professional courtesy).
If Joan Rivers hadn't been a celebrity, none of us would have ever even heard of the incident, let alone given it much thought. This brings to mind a similar incident with former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, when he died as a result of a stress test a couple of decades ago. That incident changed my mind forever about the value of stress tests.
The bottom line is that the medical profession needs to develop less invasive, less dangerous testing procedures. Surely, in this day and age, such primitive methods are no longer appropriate, nor should they be acceptable. They remind me of the ridiculous concept of a gluten challenge, whereby a patient has to endure being sick as a dog for weeks or months in order to satisfy a doctor's morbid curiosity about whether or not the patient actually meets all the criteria for an "official" diagnosis of celiac disease.
The medical profession claims to have progressed past the blood-letting that was their favorite treatment for whatever ailed a patient back in the dark ages, but the reality is, they still use some rather primitive and barbaric methods at times.
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