Wednesday, December 29, 2010

A Pinpoint Beam Strays Invisibly, Harming Instead of Healing


NYTimes

The initial accident report offered few details, except to say that an unidentified hospital had administered radiation overdoses to three patients during identical medical procedures.

It was not until many months later that the full import of what had happened in the hospital last year began to surface in urgent nationwide warnings, which advised doctors to be extra vigilant when using a particular device that delivers high-intensity, pinpoint radiation to vulnerable parts of the body.

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. [...]

2 comments:

  1. The way it's usually done is that the room with the machine in it has lasers on various surfaces. The patient is brought in before the first round of treatment, and they spend a long time lining up the beam to the exact desired location. Then they use a syringe to tattoo where each laser beam makes a dot on the patient. Before each treatment, the patient is placed on the table, and the lasers' beams are lined up with the tattoos.

    Then they shine a light through the apeture, making sure it is the exact dimensions specified by the doctor. Bottom line is, it all boils down to humans being precise, and the quality of the metal plates used to block the beams.

    In my case, since my neck was being treated, they also made a mask of my face that can be bolted down to the table so that my head wouldn't move.

    Since I'm reminiscing... During treatment I didn't feal anything. Eventually the area developed a sunburn-like sensitivity, but that's it. Smell, OTOH... it made ozone out of the oxygen in my nose, mouth and sinuses. Yuck!

    BH, I am now at 7+ years in remission. But I still have those 5 point-sized tattoos.

    -micha

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  2. Phew, what a complicated mess and the treatment is like going up the tail pipe of your car to tune the engine, gad. You just have to look at the before treatment photo to see that her lifestyle caused her problem. But medical science does not know the cause of her disease or just about every disease for that matter but they are willing to use radiation and poisonous meds to treat all of them.

    The common denominator is that the FDA needs to make it a mandatory law that all suspected health problems patients experience with medications and devices like these get reported. To not require this by law is unconscionable on the FDA's part . But I understand the FDA's side, they do not want to know because that would force them to do their job beyond just rubber stamping medications and devices using flawed company involved science. So we see a little article like this one that most people will never read or hear about. Then it happens again and again and the reality is we only hear about maybe 1% of the occurrences because they never get reported. But the bottom line is that peoples lives are destroyed by a government corporation (yes the FDA is a corporation) that fails to do even the minimum scientific investigation to prevent these tragedies, the FDA absolutely sucks.

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