The horrors I've witnessed in medicine

Taking a break from politics and religion on this blog, I would like to look at the topic of mistakes in medicine. The medical profession is rife with mistakes. Though some recent press and efforts by the prestigious Institute for Medicine attempt to highlight this and initiate efforts to minimize mistakes, there are key systematic problems that will unfortunately keep mistakes as a daily part of medical practice.
As a physician myself, I have certainly committed some errors, though fortunately none that have led to any patient deaths. I have however, witnessed some medical "mistakes" that I would characterize as horrors. Here are a few of them.
I have seen a patient with syphilis who was treated with chemotherapy drugs because her doctors thought she had an autoimmune disease instead. This unfortunate patient continued receiving such therapy despite my efforts to convince her prescribing doctors otherwise. I was, unfortunately, only a resident physician at the time and powerless to stop attending staff from committing such an atrocity. This patient eventually suffered the scarring consequences of a large syphilitic gumma on her face. It is sad to see that decades after the Tuskegee syphilis study, patients with this curable condition are being abused in America today.
I have seen a patient with respiratory failure on a ventilator who, despite improvements in his condition, was withdrawn from all supportive care and died as a result. This decision was driven by a resident who was overburdened with a busy ICU service and didn't want to bother giving this patient a fighting chance at survival.
I have seen a patient who entered an emergency room with right upper quadrant pain, nausea, elevated biliary enzymes and liver tests, as well as high white count, who was mismanaged as a heart failure exacerbation rather than being identified with ascending cholangitis. She developed a gangrenous gallbladder and sepsis under everyone's watch and ultimately required ICU admission but subsequently died. This patient was managed by an emergency medicine resident who had moonlighted the night before and had worked over 24hours without sleep. Her attending physician keep giving her words of encouragement rather than ever examining the patient for himself.
Given these are but a brief snapshot in one doctor's experience with medical horrors/mistakes that have been committed, one can only wonder what other mistakes and atrocities are going on at this moment.
What solution do I have to the problem of mistakes in medicine? One is to ensure physicians are not working at the brink of exhaustion - improving physician work hours, offering guaranteed "down time" for sleep. These restrictions go for physicians in training as well as practicing physicians. Secondly, we need to train physicians on how to think. The concept of clinical reasoning is not taught to physicians today. Physicians learn lots of facts, we learn to examine patients, we learn to look at xrays and order tests, but we do not learn how to reason through all this information to develop a rational approach to diagnosis and treatment. Ensuring that a clinical reasoning curriculum is a part of every physician's training will be one step in preventing missed or mistaken diagnoses, and inappropriate lab and xray testing on many patients.