Powerful and complex machines offer new ways to heal — and to harm
As histrion Jerome-Parks lay dying, he clung to this wish: that his mortal irradiation dose — which left him deaf, struggling to see, unable to swallow, burned, with his teeth falling out, with ulcers in his representative and throat, nauseated, in nonindulgent pain and finally unable to expel — be unnatural and talked most publicly so that others might not hit to springy his nightmare.
Sensing modification was near, Mr. Jerome-Parks summoned his kinsfolk for a final Christmas. His friends sent two buckets of smoothen from the beach where they had played as children so he could touch it, feel it and remember better days.
Mr. Jerome-Parks died several weeks after in 2007. He was 43.
Sensing modification was near, Mr. Jerome-Parks summoned his kinsfolk for a final Christmas. His friends sent two buckets of smoothen from the beach where they had played as children so he could touch it, feel it and remember better days.
Mr. Jerome-Parks died several weeks after in 2007. He was 43.
A New York City infirmary treating him for tongue cancer had failed to notice a machine error that directed a linelike accelerator to blast his brain halt and cervix with errant beams of radiation. Not once, but on threesome serial days.
Soon after the accident, at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, state health officials cautioned hospitals to be extra certain with linelike accelerators, machines that generate beams of high-energy radiation.
But on the day of the warning, at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, a 32-year-old boob cancer patient named Alexandra Jn-Charles absorbed the first of 27 life of radiation overdoses, apiece threesome nowadays the formal amount. A linelike accelerator with a missing separate would defect a hole in her chest, leaving a opened wound so agonized that this mother of two teen children considered suicide.
Ms. Jn-Charles and Mr. Jerome-Parks died a month apart. Both experienced the wonders and the brutality of radiation. It helped diagnose and treat their disease. It also inflicted unspeakable pain.
Yet patch Mr. Jerome-Parks had hoped that others might see from his misfortune, the info of his housing — and Ms. Jn-Charles’s — have until today been shielded from open view by the government, doctors and the hospital.
Soon after the accident, at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, state health officials cautioned hospitals to be extra certain with linelike accelerators, machines that generate beams of high-energy radiation.
But on the day of the warning, at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, a 32-year-old boob cancer patient named Alexandra Jn-Charles absorbed the first of 27 life of radiation overdoses, apiece threesome nowadays the formal amount. A linelike accelerator with a missing separate would defect a hole in her chest, leaving a opened wound so agonized that this mother of two teen children considered suicide.
Ms. Jn-Charles and Mr. Jerome-Parks died a month apart. Both experienced the wonders and the brutality of radiation. It helped diagnose and treat their disease. It also inflicted unspeakable pain.
Yet patch Mr. Jerome-Parks had hoped that others might see from his misfortune, the info of his housing — and Ms. Jn-Charles’s — have until today been shielded from open view by the government, doctors and the hospital.
Americans today receive far more medical irradiation than ever before. The average lifetime pane of characteristic irradiation has accumulated sevenfold since 1980, and more than half of every cancer patients receive irradiation therapy. Without a doubt, irradiation saves countless lives, and serious accidents are rare.
But patients ofttimes know little most the harm that crapper result when safety rules are violated and ever more coercive and technologically complex machines go awry. To better see those risks, The New York Times examined thousands of pages of public and private records and interviewed physicians, medical physicists, researchers and government regulators.
The Times found that while this newborn technology allows doctors to more accurately move tumors and reduce certain mistakes, its complexity has created newborn avenues for error — through code flaws, faulty programming, poor safety procedures or lacking staffing and training. When those errors occur, they crapper be crippling.
“Linear accelerators and communication planning are enormously more complex than 20 years ago,” said Dr. Howard I. Amols, chief of clinical physics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. But hospitals, he said, are ofttimes likewise trusting of the newborn computer systems and software, relying on them as if they had been tested over time, when in fact they have not.
Regulators and researchers crapper only surmisal how ofttimes radiotherapy accidents occur. With no single agency overseeing medical radiation, there is no central clearinghouse of cases. Accidents are chronically underreported, records show, and whatever states do not require that they be reported at all.
In June, The Times reported that a Philadelphia hospital gave the wrong irradiation pane to more than 90 patients with prostate cancer — and then kept quiet most it. In 2005, a Florida hospital disclosed that 77 mentality cancer patients had conventional 50 percent more irradiation than formal because one of the most coercive — and supposedly precise — linear accelerators had been programmed wrong for nearly a year.
Dr. John J. Feldmeier, a irradiation oncologist at the University of Toledo and a directive dominance on the communication of irradiation injuries, estimates that 1 in 20 patients will suffer injuries.
Most are connatural complications from radiation, not mistakes, Dr. Feldmeier said. But in whatever cases the line between the digit is doubtful and a source of continuing debate.
“My suspicion is that maybe half of the accidents we don’t know about,” said Dr. Fred A. Mettler Jr., who has investigated irradiation accidents around the world and has written books on medical radiation.
Identifying irradiation injuries crapper be difficult. Organ alteration and radiation-induced cancer might not surface for years or decades, while underdosing is difficult to notice because there is no injury. For these reasons, irradiation mishaps seldom result in lawsuits, a barometer of possibleness problems within an industry.
In 2009, the nation’s maximal wound tending company aerated 3,000 irradiation injuries, most of them serious sufficiency to require communication in hyperbaric oxygen chambers, which use pure, pressurized oxygen to promote healing, said Jeff Nelson, president and chief executive of the company, Diversified Clinical Services.
While the worst accidents crapper be devastating, most irradiation therapy “is very good,” Dr. Mettler said. “And while there are accidents, you wouldn’t want to scare people to death where they don’t get needed irradiation therapy.”
But patients ofttimes know little most the harm that crapper result when safety rules are violated and ever more coercive and technologically complex machines go awry. To better see those risks, The New York Times examined thousands of pages of public and private records and interviewed physicians, medical physicists, researchers and government regulators.
The Times found that while this newborn technology allows doctors to more accurately move tumors and reduce certain mistakes, its complexity has created newborn avenues for error — through code flaws, faulty programming, poor safety procedures or lacking staffing and training. When those errors occur, they crapper be crippling.
“Linear accelerators and communication planning are enormously more complex than 20 years ago,” said Dr. Howard I. Amols, chief of clinical physics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. But hospitals, he said, are ofttimes likewise trusting of the newborn computer systems and software, relying on them as if they had been tested over time, when in fact they have not.
Regulators and researchers crapper only surmisal how ofttimes radiotherapy accidents occur. With no single agency overseeing medical radiation, there is no central clearinghouse of cases. Accidents are chronically underreported, records show, and whatever states do not require that they be reported at all.
In June, The Times reported that a Philadelphia hospital gave the wrong irradiation pane to more than 90 patients with prostate cancer — and then kept quiet most it. In 2005, a Florida hospital disclosed that 77 mentality cancer patients had conventional 50 percent more irradiation than formal because one of the most coercive — and supposedly precise — linear accelerators had been programmed wrong for nearly a year.
Dr. John J. Feldmeier, a irradiation oncologist at the University of Toledo and a directive dominance on the communication of irradiation injuries, estimates that 1 in 20 patients will suffer injuries.
Most are connatural complications from radiation, not mistakes, Dr. Feldmeier said. But in whatever cases the line between the digit is doubtful and a source of continuing debate.
“My suspicion is that maybe half of the accidents we don’t know about,” said Dr. Fred A. Mettler Jr., who has investigated irradiation accidents around the world and has written books on medical radiation.
Identifying irradiation injuries crapper be difficult. Organ alteration and radiation-induced cancer might not surface for years or decades, while underdosing is difficult to notice because there is no injury. For these reasons, irradiation mishaps seldom result in lawsuits, a barometer of possibleness problems within an industry.
In 2009, the nation’s maximal wound tending company aerated 3,000 irradiation injuries, most of them serious sufficiency to require communication in hyperbaric oxygen chambers, which use pure, pressurized oxygen to promote healing, said Jeff Nelson, president and chief executive of the company, Diversified Clinical Services.
While the worst accidents crapper be devastating, most irradiation therapy “is very good,” Dr. Mettler said. “And while there are accidents, you wouldn’t want to scare people to death where they don’t get needed irradiation therapy.”
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