from NY Times article – “The Radiation Boom”
Marci Faber was one of the three patients. She had gone to Evanston Hospital in Illinois seeking treatment for pain emanating from a nerve deep inside her head. Today, she is in a nursing home, nearly comatose, unable to speak, eat or walk, leaving her husband to care for their three young daughters.
(etc. – well worth reading about this common procedure gone awry in hospitals all over America to be aware of how this x-ray equipment must be set-up and used properly by hospitals and x-ray tech labs for patients to be safe when it is needed.)
via The Radiation Boom — Stereotactic Radiosurgery Overdoses Harm Patients – NYTimes.com
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There is a great response to this article that discusses the past problems with stereotactic radiosurgery and the current state of radiation therapy at http://www.cyberknifeofli.blogspot.com
Sir – you are exactly the problem that caused these things to happen in the first place. Instead of making extra efforts to insure that your equipment is calibrated right, and that the known software glitches are corrected by the manufacturers and anyone using your machines – you are running around the internet making rebuttals to anywhere the investigative articles about it are found.
Death and being permanently worse off than when a patient started due to these massive radiation leaks is not a small incident. It is up to you and your company and your fellow CEOs in the industry to fix it. Don’t tell me this crap about it. Just do the extra things necessary to make this a safe and reliable procedure by making absolutely certain that problems which have been found are actually corrected.
There is no excuse for people like you in this industry or in any other health care industry. Write on my blog comments when you’ve actually done something besides pr and I will be happy to hear about it. Show me the extra measures you are personally making, the testing and calibration tests on the machines, the extra training and doubled up safety efforts and show me the software glitches between these various pieces of equipment which are known to have killed people – are fixed. Show me these hybrid machine combinations have been fixed to stop sending stray intense radioactive blasts out of them at the patients they are supposed to be helping.
People don’t want to be saved from cancer by being dead or permanently maimed and sickened by radioactivity from medical errors, technician errors or equipment malfunctions. This isn’t okay and just in need of some bit of public relations with online rebuttals. If the software can’t effectively talk between the different machine formats, get your damn industry to hire some intelligent programmers to fix it. That you can do.
Get the work done on it and prove to America’s people in need of these procedures that you and your industry are making it safe and fixing these problems with extra conscientious efforts today – right now. Stop dicking around and do your real job. That’s why you have that CEO title on your name and the pay that goes with it.
621 accidents – (which is not anywhere close to the national or international total if you want to know that) – is Six Hundred and Twenty-One individual lives damaged further that were already in need of healing, not being victimized by your profit-driven greedy and irresponsible manner of doing business. You know the problems with this equipment. These have been known for long enough to have already been fixed and what are you doing – running around the internet doing damage control? Are you totally inhuman?
None of us mind businesses making a profit but they have to do that at the same time as the other – which is to do so with enough conscience about it that the public is better for it, safer, healthier, and have better lives from it. If you and your industry colleagues can do that – it would match those mission statements you made.
Thanks for getting these things your real attention and efforts –
Get it fixed right now – It is your job and I know your industry colleagues will be persuaded to fix it as well as they meet your efforts. It isn’t the news articles that are the problem. It is the attitudes in your industry about this equipment that is the problem. How about fixing that too while you’re at it. No accidents are tolerable. Not even one mother, father, child, daughter, son, baby, grandmother, granddaddy, aunt, uncle, relation, cousin, wife, husband, or friend should ever have to endure any of these mistakes again.
Thankyou –
- cricketdiane
your comment on my blog
dianecphillips@comcast.net
On:
Jan 01/04/11 9:17 PM
To:jmusmacher@cancer-radiation.com
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