Posted by Yvonne,
They say that of all the patients who come in for cancer radiation treatment in America, about 5% will suffer injuries, many of them avoidably so. And many of them, hidden in a way that won’t surface for weeks. What kind of things can go wrong with these machines that this happens so often? Much of the time, maintenance staff will forget to correctly position the parts that send out radiation. Sometimes, the radioactive seeds that are placed inside the patient, are wrongly placed so that the wrong body part receives radiation – in quantities that will be intolerable for the part. Since there is no law that governs this, and hospitals are terrified of malpractice lawsuits, they typically do not discipline anyone, for fear that it could look like they were to blame for their actions. There is always a good side to legal accountability, and a bad side. This would be an example of the latter.
