Unbelievable Medical Mistakes

not neat

My DH is a pharmacist at a VA hospital, his full time job at one point was to go around and catch the errors the doctors made.
That should tell you how often mistakes are made.... it's very scary.

@Alex. Surgeons do have checklists. They call them "timeouts" and one of the jobs of the surgical nurses is to make sure this happens before surgery begins. They've had them for years, but compliance is variable depending on doctors and institutions. I personally am a big supporter of all encompassing electronic medical records just because they prevent alot of errors and save on redundant tests. Perhaps what might work is some sort of RFID or bar code system where a surgeon has to enter the procedure they intend to do and that entry can be compared with another one entered by a physican during the pre-operative evaluation. That would force compliance if billing were contingent on the the completion of this process prior to the procedure and it is more difficult to fudge compared to paper records as the time of entry is logged.

i've had several surgeries on my ankle lately and each time they take a Sharpie pen and they not only write something like 'THIS LEG' with an 'X' or some such thing - but they also write 'NO' on the other leg. the fact that 'NO' looked like 'ON' when viewed from the other side was a little alarming...but all went well.

You are right there, also Lukere, I missed that. What I sometimes do to check is copy an entire paragraph or two and Google it to see how many times in the past that exact copypasta comes up. That's what teachers do when checking student essays and research papers. I think I will link Oddee's article.