New Radiation Technologies Promise Cures, but Also Linked to Injuries
The New York Times has published an excellent report on the increasing frequency of radiation errors in many of New York’s hospitals, and the trail of debilitation, serious injuries or death that are often left behind. These increasing numbers of errors have come with the introduction of sophisticated complex machines that promise targeted cures using radiation therapy.
The New York Times profiles a few cases where individuals have been injured by excessive dosages of radiation, and later died from their injuries. In one of the cases profiled, the radiation was delivered to the wrong parts of the body, because of technical malfunctioning of the equipment, and the failure of the staff to catch the error in time.
Much of the problem, the NYT says, comes from the fact that these new machines come with few technical safeguards to prevent errors in radiation. As a New Jersey medical malpractice lawyer, I find it hard to understand how a complex linear accelerator, that can deliver intense targeted radiation to specific affected parts of the body, can be allowed to function when there is a malfunction that causes radiation to be delivered to other parts of the body too. Yet, that is exactly what happened with the linear accelerator in one of the cases profiled in the New York Times report. Warning messages in that case were not noticed by staff and technicians.
Hospitals and doctors have grown too reliant on these technologies that are still new. There has also been a failure in training staff to operate these machines properly.
For patients who have been injured by radiation errors, tracing their injuries to these errors can be hard. Often injuries don’t show up for months and years after the error has taken place. Even worse, the kinds of injuries that result from radiation errors are almost untreatable - there is little that can be done to repair the damage.
