DR. DUBIOUS.....

Don’t you love to hear wild and strange stories about screw-ups in the health industry? Let’s face it, hospitals are dangerous places. They’re filled with sick people and wannabees. I wouldn’t mind them if the only men and women allowed in them were healthy. Who wants to be surrounded by coughing, hacking and kvetching people? Let them stay home if they’re not well and not spread their germs.

Almost everyone has a horror story about a doctor making a mistake in diagnosis or prescribing the wrong meds. They are very fallible people. Once they get their medical diplomas their brains often shut down and they’re of no use except as a golf partner.

To prove how susceptible we are to medical goof-ups I point to a story out of Seoul, Korea. Let me first admit that I wasn’t too surprised when reading about this medical disaster. It seems that Konyang University Hospital in Seoul can’t be considered in the same breath as the Mayo Clinic or even your local veterinarian’s office. A staff doctor at the hospital mistakenly removed part of the stomach of a patient due to have thyroid surgery, while removing the thyroid gland of another scheduled for stomach surgery. Oooops.

I don’t mean to be harsh or critical but does a stomach really look a lot like a thyroid gland? Apparently it does for the doctor who operated on the two women in their sixties who were both in for surgery the same day. I mean, even a graduate from Grenada’s Medical University and Auto Parts Store would be able to tell the difference between body parts. A heart does not look like a carburetor. And a gall bladder only resembles a hubcap on certain models.

The Korean medical staff only found out about the goof after filing paperwork on the two women. If the above wasn’t frightening enough the same doctor later performed the “correct” surgical procedures on both women and re-attached the part of the stomach he had removed from the patient with the thyroid problem. The healthy thyroid that was removed couldn’t be re-attached but the thyroid-less patient was given a chicken and a bowling ball for her trouble. Both were said to be recovering from their operations and the one woman bowled a 300 game to the delight of her chicken.

There is a lesson to this story if you dig deep enough. One: do not go into a hospital in Seoul, Korea for an operation unless you put a yellow stick-em on the part to be operated on. Two: make sure that the doctor isn’t wearing his surgical mask over his eyes.