Fortunately, the world is full of zero-cost solutions that save lives. It's just a matter of convincing people to use them. For instance ...

Modern health care is a miracle, but it's an expensive miracle. However the health care works in your particular country, a stay at the hospital is costing somebody thousands of dollars. But what price is too high when you need a surgeon to unblock your damned arteries?

6 A To-Do List in the Operating Room Cuts Deaths in Half

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If you're a patient preparing for surgery, it probably wouldn't put you at ease to see the surgeon flip open a to-do list before you go under the gas ("Oh, I cut the patient open, then pull out the liver!"). Surgeons are, after all, some of the smartest and most capable people in the world, with a decade of medical school under their belts. They shouldn't need goddamned Post-it notes to know what they're doing. Yet studies have shown that using a simple checklist during surgery can dramatically decrease the chances of something going wrong.

And we're not just talking about med students who can't tell a scalpel from the plastic knife they got with their Wendy's baked potato. Researchers did a massive study spanning eight hospitals in different countries. Some of the facilities were state of the art, while others may have left the least drunk doctor in charge of the defibrillator. In all cases, using a checklist cut the death rate of all surgeries in half, while complications dropped by more than a third.

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Another study looking at data from 103 different hospitals showed that a simple checklist gave them a 66 percent decrease in the number of potentially fatal catheter infections, while yet another checklist has been shown to increase the number of preventive health measures physicians take. That's all it took -- a little piece of paper to remind them the right way to do it.

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"I was gonna pour lemon juice onto his kidneys, but then I checked the list."

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Still, medical professionals don't like to use them -- they tend to find them patronizing and just plain annoying. Yet others point out that airline pilots (another group of highly trained, proud professionals) have been obsessing over checklists for decades and not bitching about it. So if one highly complex, life-or-death task benefits from poring over a checklist, then why not apply it to the guys tinkering around inside your body?