Unbelievable Medical Mistakes

This is more common than you might think. My brother-in-law got one of his jobs after someone irradiated the wrong kidney.

This sh*t is horrifying.

blogspam.. the article was copied from
http://www.oddee.com/item_96576.aspx

Mea culpa, Lukere. When I saw it was on Oddee, I assumed it was originally somewhere else. But I searched further, and found the original story from 2007, at ABC news. I've corrected the link.

you hear the stories of people writing on their leg "Other Leg" just to be sure the docs take the right one.
It's sad and funny. Sa-unny? Sadny?

Oddee copies stories? Wow, that's sad because I quite like what they have sometimes.

What the medical profession (especially surgery) needs is a checklist. A study by Dr. Atul Gawande showed that a simple checklist could halve the death rate at surgery. Funny thing was, hospitals and doctors resisted the idea, saying that it's just more paperwork.

The original link had some oddee tags all over their images/links, that's why I mentioned Oddee as the source.

At Oddee's article each small story has got a link to a news site/source... although quite similar to ABC's article, both have a couple of very good extra/different stories.

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.

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.

@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.

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.

not neat