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How a surgeon at Mass. General performed the wrong procedure on a patient
By adamg on Thu, 11/11/2010 - 3:57pm
The New England Journal of Medicine has a case study on the error, in which the surgeon himself explains what happened and the hospital discusses how it changed its policies to try to prevent this. The case study doesn't say when the incident occurred, but notes the case was originally discussed at a conference in January, 2009.
Via CommonHealth.
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Comments
wrong surgery
What are the odds that a Dr. Named Ring would perform this surgery whne it should have been on the "ring"finger.
yowza! that's my surgeon...!
...kudos to dr. ring for explaining what went wrong in an effort to make sure mistakes like this don't happen in the future. dr. ring performed a somewhat tricky nerve-transposition surgery on me about ten years ago, and i credit him with saving the strength and mobility of my dominant arm. as far as i am concerned, i would trust nobody else. i am really impressed with him coming forward with this, publicly, when many other surgeons would be trying to quietly brush it under the rug :)
Yeah
Seems like he dealt with it appropriately. And really, of all the wrong-site errors one could make, this seems really minor. I mean, as a patient I think I'd be annoyed/distrustful too, but it seems like it would be basically correctable -- I'm not sure if an unnecessary carpal tunnel release would cause weakness or something, but that's still a lot more manageable than, say, amputating the wrong thing or taking out the wrong organ or leaving instruments in someone or forgetting to close off an artery.