2023-10-19
54 分钟In medicine, failure can be catastrophic. It can also produce discoveries that save millions of lives. Tales from the front line, the lab, and the I.T. department.
Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner.
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In early 2007, Carol Hemulgarn's life was for ever changed by a failure, a tragic medical failure.
At the time, she was working for Pfizer, the huge us pharmaceutical firm, so she was familiar with the healthcare system.
But what changed her life wasn't a professional failure.
This was personal.
My nine year old daughter, Alyssa, was diagnosed with leukemia, a L L, on a Monday afternoon, and she died ten days later.
In this day and age of healthcare, children don't die of leukemia in nine days.
She died from multiple medical errors.
She got a hospital acquired infection, which we know today can be prevented.
She was labeled.
And when you attach labels to patients, a bias is formed, and it's often difficult to look beyond that bias.
So one of the failures in my daughter's care is that she was labeled with anxiety.
The young resident treating her never asked myself or her father if she was an anxious child, and she wasn't.
What happens is we treat anxiety, but we don't treat scared, afraid and frightened.
And that's what my daughter was.
Hospitals are frightening places to children.