Doctors Leave Medical Equipment in Patients
Nurse, where’s my scalpel?
Are you having trouble getting through airport metal detectors ever since that appendectomy a few years back?
If so, you might be carrying around a hemostat or two — in your belly!
That’s right: According to a recent New England Journal of Medicine report, 1500 patients a year in the U.S. leave the operating table with some of the hospital’s equipment still INSIDE THEM. What are the most common hiding places for wayward clamps, sponges, electrodes, retractors and various and sundry other instruments? The chest, abdomen, hips, and body cavities like the vagina. Oh, and here’s an interesting tidbit: This kind of thing happens a lot more often to patients who are overweight!
The study further showed that fully two-thirds of these mistakes occurred even though the surgical equipment was inventoried before AND AFTER the procedure. This means that not only can’t these doctors operate — they can’t even count! Complications from these blunders led to internal bleeding, infection, and sometimes death. Yet in some cases, patients weren’t even aware of their little stowaways until they were “uncovered” in a later procedure.
These findings, from a Harvard-affiliated study (the largest of its kind ever conducted), should rightly shock you
Even though such mistakes are relatively rare (about 1 in 20,000), they’d be even more of a scarcity if all the unnecessary surgeries Americans undergo each year were eliminated. That — and apparently losing weight — will keep us out of harm’s way as much as possible.
Sometimes being cautious can’t hurt,
William Campbell Douglass II, MD
