Radiation Overdose Malpractice

In 2005, a man called Scott Jerome-Parks was diagnosed with tongue cancer as was recommended radiation therapy by doctors. He agreed to the treatment, unaware that during his therapy the computers would be incorrectly programmed resulting in a radiation overdose. This tragic mistake exposed Jerome-Parks to seven times the expected treatment. In the end, the treatment left him deaf, almost blind, unable to swallow, burned, teeth falling out, with ulcers in mouth and throat, nauseated, in severe pain and finally incapable of breathing. He died a couple of years later at the age of 43, from the radiation overdose and not from the tongue cancer.

After the Jerome-Parks incident, the State Health Department sent a warning to hospitals to ensure that the radiation field is of the appropriate size and shape. On the very same day as that warning, Alexandra Jn-Charles was the subject of a similar radiation overdose in her first treatment for breast cancer. This type of treatment went on for 27 days. Jn-Charles was assured that the procedure would be painless, much like an x-ray. Notwithstanding that, by the end of the therapy the radiation had pierced a hole into her chest so deep that it exposed her ribs. She died a month after Scott Perome-Parks.

In both the cases, there were plenty of opportunities to discover the mistakes, but operators failed to notice the avoidable errors. In June, it was 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 revealed that 77 brain cancer patients had received 50% more radiation than prescribed because one of the most powerful and supposedly precise linear accelerators had been programmed improperly for almost a year. Though many accident details are confidential under state law, the records described 621 mistakes from 2001 to 2008. Even more disturbing, on 284 occasions, radiation missed all or part of its intended target or treated the wrong body part entirely.

While challengers of health care reform have proposed distractions like reducing the rights of injured patients, the above stories show just how ill-advised a proposal like that is. According to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), preventable medical errors cause the death of as many as 98,000 people every year at a cost of $29 billion. That&;s like two passenger airplanes crashing every day during an entire year.