Hospitals Should “Be Extra Careful with Linear Accelerators”
January 25th, 2010This piece is classic New York Times. There must be an editorial template at that rag. Write about atrocity, smooth it over with experts and a clear, non-sticky Everything Is OK gel.
The article below reads like this:
Behold the marvels of modern medicine. Sure, atrocities happen here and there. Well, maybe more often than that. Well, we don’t know because they’re covered up a lot. But did we mention the marvels of modern medicine? Ok, good.
Via: New York Times:
As Scott Jerome-Parks lay dying, he clung to this wish: that his fatal radiation overdose — which left him deaf, struggling to see, unable to swallow, burned, with his teeth falling out, with ulcers in his mouth and throat, nauseated, in severe pain and finally unable to breathe — be studied and talked about publicly so that others might not have to live his nightmare.
Sensing death was near, Mr. Jerome-Parks summoned his family for a final Christmas. His friends sent two buckets of sand from the beach where they had played as children so he could touch it, feel it and remember better days.
Mr. Jerome-Parks died several weeks later in 2007. He was 43.
A New York City hospital treating him for tongue cancer had failed to detect a computer error that directed a linear accelerator to blast his brain stem and neck with errant beams of radiation. Not once, but on three consecutive days.
Soon after the accident, at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, state health officials cautioned hospitals to be extra careful with linear accelerators, machines that generate beams of high-energy radiation.
But on the day of the warning, at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, a 32-year-old breast cancer patient named Alexandra Jn-Charles absorbed the first of 27 days of radiation overdoses, each three times the prescribed amount. A linear accelerator with a missing filter would burn a hole in her chest, leaving a gaping wound so painful that this mother of two young children considered suicide.
…
Regulators and researchers can only guess how often radiotherapy accidents occur. With no single agency overseeing medical radiation, there is no central clearinghouse of cases. Accidents are chronically underreported, records show, and some states do not require that they be reported at all.
In June, The Times reported that a Philadelphia hospital gave the wrong radiation dose to more than 90 patients with prostate cancer — and then kept quiet about it. In 2005, a Florida hospital disclosed that 77 brain cancer patients had received 50 percent more radiation than prescribed because one of the most powerful — and supposedly precise — linear accelerators had been programmed incorrectly for nearly a year.
Dr. John J. Feldmeier, a radiation oncologist at the University of Toledo and a leading authority on the treatment of radiation injuries, estimates that 1 in 20 patients will suffer injuries.
Most are normal complications from radiation, not mistakes, Dr. Feldmeier said. But in some cases the line between the two is uncertain and a source of continuing debate.
“My suspicion is that maybe half of the accidents we don’t know about,” said Dr. Fred A. Mettler Jr., who has investigated radiation accidents around the world and has written books on medical radiation.
This is another classic Times template, pure hit piece, and one of my all-time favorites: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/03/health/03patient.html?_r=1&scp=14&sq=cancer%20coretta&st=cse
They bemoan the fate of Coretta Scott King, who died on January 30, 2006 of cancer, because, tragically, she was foolish enough to place her trust in “uncertain benefits” of alternative medicine. Oddly, though, they never mentioned Wendy Wasserstein, who died that very same day, also of cancer. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that Wendy Wasserstein was only 55 when she died, and she was the recipient of the indisputably superior methods being used at her health provider of choice, Sloan-Kettering.
Big money science is the only way in a world dominated by, you guessed it, big money.