RESEARCH ARTICLE
A Tale of Two Cases: Preventing Errors in Oncology and Medicine
Lopes Gilberto de Lima*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2009Volume: 2
First Page: 25
Last Page: 32
Publisher ID: TOPHJ-2-25
DOI: 10.2174/1874944500902010025
Article History:
Received Date: 26/02/2009Revision Received Date: 03/04/2009
Acceptance Date: 22/05/2009
Electronic publication date: 31/8/2009
Collection year: 2009
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Betsy Lehman, a knowledgeable health reporter for the Boston Globe, died due to an overdose of the chemotherapy that was supposed to treat her breast cancer [1]. Willie King, a diabetic patient in Florida, already concerned about having to live with one leg, woke up to discover that the surgical team amputated the wrong limb [2]. Ben Kolb, a 7-year-old boy from St. Lucie, Florida, died after the surgeon who was operating his ear injected epinephrine instead of the local anesthetic lidocaine [3]. The common thread: medical errors.