Thomas Shaknovsky botched the surgery of William Bryan, 70, who died on the operating table
According to Shaknovksy’s deposition, after removing Bryan’s liver, the surgeon instructed a nurse to label the organ as a “spleen” – and he also identified it as a spleen in Bryan’s postoperative notes. Shaknovsky later said he had been “mentally compromised” at the time of Bryan’s death, explaining that he was “devastated, demoralized, crying over his passing, felt that I failed him”.
Though this was an idiocity, I think we need to be careful with just blaming the surgeon and that’s it.
Errors like this usually happen because of a chain of various circumstances and other little mistakes, like with airplane crashes.
I think it would be much better that we treat these sort of incidents like airplane crashes. Investigate everything that went wrong, all causes, without focussing on guilt during the investigation. Guilt can be determined from the results of that, but primarily I want that we get data on how this happened in the first place, and what we can do to avoid this from happening again. This strategy was highly successful in aviation, I’d like to see that applied here too because too much shit still goes too much wrong in healthcare
It’s been a while since I’ve operated on anyone (consentually, at least). I know some doctors can be so arrogant that you don’t ever want to second-guess them or correct them for fear of bring berated. Aren’t there other people directly over the patient who might butt in and say “hey, are you sure that’s the right part?”
I soooo wanna know about the implied non-consensual operations…
It’s the doctor from The Human Centipede.
Music video version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFokXnCCMf8
There has been, as I recall, all sorts of fucked up nonsense, usually involving minorities and women. Go in for one thing and oh whoops, you’re sterile now! A lot of insane shit like that. People going to the doctor’s to figure out a problem with an organ they didn’t realize that they no longer have, that kinda bullshit.
That entire “don’t ever want to second guess them” was put upside down with airplane captains where they are.trained to communicate and not be afraid to speak up when they see a problem, lest we have a other Tenerife incident
Yeah there’s a reason they have kinda long checklists when doing operations.
People have had the wrong leg cut off etc. Although that’s perhaps a more understandably a bureaucratic mistake instead of a surgeon mistaking a liver for a spleen. But granted, I’ve never cut into the human body so even though they’re pretty distinct in graphics, once covered in blood and whatnot they might not look so different. Idk. But I think he should have.
Yep the main driver is that people didn’t need to fly, it’s an option, so they had incentives to make it look safe (just being safe is very hard but not enough).
While most surgeries are not really optional and the only incentives are profit by hospitals. What are you going to do, not have surgery?