Medical Malpractice

Why is this kind of thing happening with regulations in place?

Dr. Kao, graduate of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, BOTCHED 92 out of 116 Prostate Cancer treatments. And then he tried to cover it up. The VA Hospital in Philadelphia was Accredited by the Joint Commission days after discoveries that something was wrong. "Soon after, the N.R.C. sent its own inspectors to Philadelphia. And the more the inspectors looked, the more they found. All told, 57 of the implants delivered too little radiation to the prostate, either because the seeds missed the prostate or were not distributed properly inside the prostate. Thirty-five other cases involved overdoses to other parts of the body. An unspecified number of patients were both underdosed in the prostate and overdosed elsewhere." As for one of the patients who got a botched treatment, this is what happened: "At first, Pastor Flippin’s implant seemed fine. But 10 months later, he said, he began experiencing bowel pain that worsened with time. Now back in West Virginia, Pastor Flippin sought treatment at a V.A. hospital in Huntington. Doctors there suspected constipation, hemorrhoids or gas. “They gave me suppositories, they gave me flushings, they gave me a rinse where you sit in and everything else,” Pastor Flippin said. “I’m saying none of this is working.” Doctors then prescribed narcotics. “It was just a succession of painkiller after painkiller after painkiller, and it got to the point where I said, ‘I don’t want any more morphine,’ ” Pastor Flippin said. His weight dropped to 109 pounds, a 20 percent loss. He had to quit his job coordinating after-school programs for a coalition of churches in Charleston, W.Va. “This is not working,” he told his doctors. “I’m barely alive, I’m wasting away and you all are not doing anything.” Increasingly desperate, Pastor Flippin sought help from the Ohio State University Medical Center, where a doctor finally made a diagnosis: “Radiation injury to anal canal,” he wrote. Surgery was performed to cover the damaged area with a tissue flap. It would be another year and a half before a letter from the V.A. arrived, informing Pastor Flippin in August 2008 that he had received a flawed implant. “The treatment you received did not meet V.A.’s high standard of care,” the letter said. At this point, it hardly mattered that the V.A. rendered Pastor Flippin’s first name wrong, calling him Richard, rather than Ricardo." http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/health/21radiation.html?pagewanted=1

Public Comments

1. Doesn't that just give you all sorts of warm tingly feelings up your leg when you think about how successful government run health care is going to be?
2. Look at our economic problems at hand.... Look how many regulations were in place and yet we still find ourselves in deep sh|t. The problem is regulation is brought upon by the government, making it difficult to enforce and leaving no option for the private markets to enforce the same type of regulation. In this case, I can't imagine that one insurance provider wouldn't notice a red flag with so many complications following the same procedure by the same doc.
3. Someone is not enforcing the regulations properly, probably because there are some people who are against regulations all together. Less regulation would only make this worse, and this kind of neglect and fraud never discovered. Regulation that is enforced would be the solution.
4. The VA is far from the only hospital that has hidden medical errors by doctors from the public. Doctors protect their own. Many doctors with huge black marks against their records continue to practice to this day. There needs to be a quick way for patients to look up someone and find out if they have any problems, not just lawsuits, on their record.