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Our trust in medics should have a limit, let’s monitor their work
Patients always trust their medics to the extent of striping without fear
Sometimes we believe in our doctors and end up trusting them with our lives. To some people doctors are like semi-gods that know everything about our lives.
A young lady confessed that she can never comfortably allow any man see her private parts except her gynecologist. This is the level of trust people have in their doctors.
It is quite unfortunate that the very people we trust end up messing with our lives.
Our trust in medics stems from the fact that they go through years and years of schooling and training. Most medical practitioners are extremely bright, and have a desire to learn more and do their best at everything they do.
Yet, what happens when your doctor makes a medical mistake? The results could be disastrous, sometimes resulting in serious injury or death.
Between June 2016 and March 2017, a total of 86 women who had paid 50,000 Yuan ($7,700) to be inseminated with sperm from “candidates carefully selected from the Chinese elite” were instead fertilized with swine semen.
To put it clearly, this is semen from pigs. Only 4 of these women actually got pregnant, and all of them miscarried before the end of their pregnancies.
It was established that one of these aborted fetuses was so deformed and a doctor who saw it demanded an autopsy, and it was revealed that the embryo was part human and part animal.
A police investigation then led to the discovery of an unusual fraud involving the Rhinoceros Horn Fertility Clinic and six of its employees. They discovered that the clinic was purchasing pig semen from farmers in a nearby village and using it to fertilize its customers.
We have had cases of doctors operating on the wrong body part. The cause of such a mistake is claimed to come from a patient having an incorrect chart or a surgeon misreading it, or surgical draping obscuring marks that denote the correct side of the operation.
This means that the surgeon cuts into the wrong side of a patient’s body. As a caution ensure that before surgery you reaffirm with the nurse and the surgeon the correct body part and side of your operation.
One of the most tragic medical mistakes occurred in 2003, when surgeons at Duke University Hospital transplanted organs with the wrong blood type into 17-year-old Jesica Santillan. After receiving the wrong heart and lungs, her body began to shut down and she suffered severe brain damage.
Dr. James Jaggers tried to correct the mistake with a second transplant with the correct blood type, but she died soon after. The doctor accepted responsibility for the tragic mistake, though Santillan’s life could not be recovered.
We ought to stop assuming that doctors are super humans. As patients we have a role of monitoring what is going on as doctors do their job especially if we can. There are so many mistakes we are likely to discover and this will save lives.
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