Cancer Radiation Treatment

Cancer Radiation Treatment - Is the Cure Worse than the Disease?

America is X-Ray nation, not to mention scan and radiation nation too. For some diseases like cancer and tumors, radiation can be the miracle treatment everyone hopes for. But still, studies keep saying that patients in America receive far more radiation today than ever before, and that it may not be as safe a custom to expose half of all cancer patients to radiation therapy. With the pressure that doctors, nurses and maintenance crews face, and with spectacularly complex computerized engines running labs at all hospitals, it is often only a matter of time before something goes deeply wrong. When you use your Windows PC, and opening one program causes something else to crash, you can shrug it off, and perhaps curse at Microsoft. When this happens at the hospital to a piece of custom computerized wizardry that is meant to give you cancer radiation treatment, you may not be around to curse at it. There have been cases reported recently of how some of these machines, with new , sometimes inadequately tested programming, have succeeded in blowing holes in their patients' bodies; bodies they were meant to heal.

Sometimes, the machines are just okay, but maintenance issues are to blame. A New York hospital burnt a hole in a cancer patient's chest, because the maintenance crew had forgotten to replace a filter that would regulate the dosage. Poor training, poor pay, poor safety records, the list goes on. What is worse, there is no central government agency that keeps tabs on the machines out there, the technology, and how much they can underperform. Why, these accidents are not even required by law to be reported anywhere. It was reported that five years ago, a hospital in Florida blasted dozens of patients in for cancer radiation treatment with one and a half times more radiation than was safe; and a hospital in Pennsylvania did the same to a hundred patients or so. It took a whistleblower to bring the news out, and hospitals actually said nothing about how all this was due to incompetent settings made to the machines.

These are not that rare either; 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.