For patients with prostate cancer, it is a common surgical procedure: a doctor implants dozens of radioactive seeds to attack the disease. But when Dr. Gary D. Kao treated one patient at the veterans’ hospital in Philadelphia, his aim was more than a little off.
Most of the seeds, 40 in all, landed in the patient’s healthy bladder, not the prostate.
It was a serious mistake, and under federal rules, regulators investigated. But Dr. Kao, with their consent, made his mistake all but disappear.
He simply rewrote his surgical plan to match the number of seeds in the prostate, investigators said.
This article ran on the front page of Sunday’s paper. There is a great picture accompanying it of the minister now serving in West Virginia to whom my heart really goes out after all he has been through.
And we want this government to run our health care as well…
If the Government wants to run our healthcare, then I suggest that they fix Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and the BIA healthcare systems first.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
Echoing what MBIC said about the Indian Health Service:
http://www.alaskajournal.com/stories/061909/loc_2_001.shtml
What a heart-breaking story, WPS. It’s always sad when someone is ignored in this fashion and the results so dire, but when it’s a child the grief is just overwhelming.
Something similar happened, thankfully not terminal, to a Canadian colleague of mine. His right hand became numb and the feeling progressed until virtually his entire right side was desensitized. A Canadian doc told him it was all in his head, but my friend prevailed on him to schedule a CAT scan…it would only take three months. The numbness wa so acute that my friend paid for a scan in Detroit (it was scheduled for the day after he requested it) and it revealed a nerve in his neck so badly pinched that would have been permanently paralyzed in less than a month.
A few years ago, when I was looking at a town in northern Arizona for retirement, I was appalled to find that both the BIA and VA hospitals had better ratings than the public hospital. Apparently so are the locals, as there are two new hospitals under construction.
The V.A. also possibly exposed thousands of veterans to HIV and other poor sterilization procedures.
See http://wcbstv.com/health/vets.care.inspection.2.1046422.html
Most frightening words in the English language – “I’m from the Government and I’m here to help you.”