RESEARCH ARTICLE


A Tale of Two Cases: Preventing Errors in Oncology and Medicine



Lopes Gilberto de Lima*
Johns Hopkins Singapore International Medical Centre and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, 11 Jalan Tan Tock Seng, Level 1, Singapore, 308433, Republic of Singapore.


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Creative Commons License
Gilberto de Lima et al.; Licensee Bentham Open

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Johns Hopkins Singapore International Medical Centre and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, 11 Jalan Tan Tock Seng, Level 1, Singapore, 308433, Republic of Singapore; Tel: +65 6880 2222; Fax: +65 6880 2240; E-mails: glopes@imc.jhmi.eduglopes.md@gmail.com


Abstract

Betsy Lehman, a knowledgeable health reporter for the Boston Globe, died due to an overdose of the chemotherapy that was supposed to treat her breast cancer [1]. Willie King, a diabetic patient in Florida, already concerned about having to live with one leg, woke up to discover that the surgical team amputated the wrong limb [2]. Ben Kolb, a 7-year-old boy from St. Lucie, Florida, died after the surgeon who was operating his ear injected epinephrine instead of the local anesthetic lidocaine [3]. The common thread: medical errors.