• Cancer patient given radiation overdose
    12 replies, posted
[QUOTE]A cancer patient in Edinburgh has been given twice the intended dosage of radiation by medical staff. The patient was being given palliative radiotherapy last September at the Western General Hospital. A Scottish government report said the patient was given a dosage 100% greater than prescribed and there was a "significant possibility of serious harm". NHS Lothian said it had offered its "sincere apologies" to the patient. The mistaken dosage was given to the patient between 14 and 18 September 2015. Mistaken calculations were made by two radiologists based at the hospital, who both administered a double dose after apparently making the same error. The report said "a number of mistakes" had been made by staff, saying these should have been avoided due to the experience of the radiologists involved. However, it concluded that none of these mistakes could "clearly" be identified as wrongdoing or negligence. The new incident comes 10 years after 15-year-old Lisa Norris was overexposed to radiation at the Beatson Oncology Centre in Glasgow. She received an overdose 58% greater than intended, although her dosage was higher than that of the patient involved in the 2015 case.[/QUOTE] [url]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-36748087[/url]
How in the fuck do you execute the same error twice in one check. Moreoever, if you KNOW the dose is over the limit and inherently harmful [I]regardless of patient condition[/I] why by the power of castle grayskull would you press the commit button. Ever.
man that's bad. still not as bad as the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25]Therac-25[/url] though [quote]The accidents occurred when the high-power electron beam was activated instead of the intended low power beam, and without the beam spreader plate rotated into place. Previous models had hardware interlocks in place to prevent this, but Therac-25 had removed them, depending instead on software interlocks for safety. The software interlock could fail due to a race condition. The defect was as follows: a one-byte counter in a testing routine frequently overflowed; if an operator provided manual input to the machine at the precise moment that this counter overflowed, the interlock would fail.[2] The high-powered electron beam struck the patients with approximately 100 times the intended dose of radiation, delivering a potentially lethal dose of beta radiation. The feeling was described by patient Ray Cox as "an intense electric shock", causing him to scream and run out of the treatment room.[3] Several days later, radiation burns appeared and the patients showed the symptoms of radiation poisoning; in three cases, the injured patients later died as a result of the overdose.[4][/quote] [code]MALFUNCTION 54[/code]
[QUOTE=Turnips5;50675256]man that's bad. still not as bad as the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25]Therac-25[/url] though [code]MALFUNCTION 54[/code][/QUOTE] I think I recall reading a thorough paper on something like this. Apparently there was a patient that got 28,000x the recommended dose to his head. He "saw" a bright flash and "heard" crackling in his right ear. He died 2 weeks later of acute radiation poisoning. In all of the incidents, though, the patients died in agony and all that had to be done to prevent it were for there to be mechanical safeguards instead of just software safeguards.
radiation doses at these levels are not to a point that the person wont bounce back from it its more a quality of life kind of thing... giving them an extra month of feeling sick while their clock is already ticking is... regrettable.
[QUOTE=Blizzerd;50675574]radiation doses at these levels are not to a point that the person wont bounce back from it its more a quality of life kind of thing... giving them an extra month of feeling sick while their clock is already ticking is... regrettable.[/QUOTE] What? Can you please elaborate on/clarify what you just wrote?
[QUOTE=Blizzerd;50675574]radiation doses at these levels are not to a point that the person wont bounce back from it its more a quality of life kind of thing... giving them an extra month of feeling sick while their clock is already ticking is... regrettable.[/QUOTE] Did you not read where her death was unrelated to the cancer and also the other part wherein the stage and type of said cancer was not mentioned?
[QUOTE=27X;50675632]Did you not read where her death was unrelated to the cancer and also the other part wherein the stage and type of said cancer was not mentioned?[/QUOTE] [QUOTE]The patient was being given palliative radiotherapy last September at the Western General Hospital.[/QUOTE] that means they were trying to extend her life through chemotherapy. palliative radiotherapy implies she was not going to beat the cancer [IMG]http://i.cubeupload.com/blYqzS.png[/IMG]
[QUOTE=Blizzerd;50675574]radiation doses at these levels are not to a point that the person wont bounce back from it its more a quality of life kind of thing... giving them an extra month of feeling sick while their clock is already ticking is... regrettable.[/QUOTE] If you're looking at large amounts given as a targeted dose, you're risking 50-100% mortality if the dose goes above 6 grays' worth of radiation, and that's even with care. The only thing we don't know in this situation is how much radiation the patient was planned to receive, and how much they were receiving per fraction, and what not. Even then, even with the lowest doses of radiation, you're risking serious side effects like hemorrhaging and infections secondary to further compromise of an already weakened immune system. This doesn't help matters if they have a poor tolerance to radiotherapy to start with either. short version: no, this isn't something you can easily bounce back from in many cases. Something like this happening could even result in patient noncompliance for further treatment, assuming they survive.
[QUOTE=Bradyns;50675583]What? Can you please elaborate on/clarify what you just wrote?[/QUOTE] I think hes saying that the patient getting a higher level of radiation that necessary is bad because while the dose of radiation isn't lethal, it will make them feel worse for a longer amount of time and since the patient is terminal, time is valuable.
Forgot to add, a typical palliative radiation dose is 30 grey in 10 fractions, for a cancer patient that comes down to about 30 Sv/s for a hundredst of a second, and only very directionally per treatment, for a total of 30 sv over a course of several months.
[QUOTE=Blizzerd;50675756]Forgot to add, a typical palliative radiation dose is 30 grey in 10 fractions, for a cancer patient that comes down to about 30 Sv/s for a hundredst of a second, and only very directionally per treatment, for a total of 30 sv over a course of several months.[/QUOTE] 30 sieverts is deathly high levels of radiation (even with small exposure time), and those irradiated cells will spread. To my knowledge the medical dosage is much smaller (but I'm no nuclear physician). Apparently the dose [URL="http://www.scotsman.com/news/health/patient-given-radiation-overdose-at-edinburgh-cancer-centre-1-4172915"]was 40 grays[/URL], so it was actually 40Sv
[QUOTE=Blizzerd;50675686]that means they were trying to extend her life through chemotherapy. palliative radiotherapy implies she was not going to beat the cancer [/QUOTE] I've had two people die from cancer over the last year, I'm MORE than aware what the treatment is for. None of that addresses your initial statement, and there is no concrete context in the article.
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