Dennis Quaid's movie star status affords his family the best medical care available. But it couldn't shield his children from the dangers encountered by rich and by poor upon entering a hospital.
As everyone knows, the Quaid twins were mistakenly given intravenous doses of the blood thinner, Heparin, 2000 times stronger than prescribed.
Recently, on 60 Minutes, the Quaids offered their diagnosis: the cause of the medical error was unclear labeling of the child vs adult packaging. Others fault hospital staff for not reading the label.
Now the state of California has fined the offending hospital $25,000, causing some to regard the case as closed, but is it?
Not if you take a closer look.
Under our prevalent medical philosophy, it's common to misdiagnose by quickly fixing a symptom (it was the label!) rather than by addressing the fundamental causation for a systemic problem.
Each year, according to government records as many as 98,000 people die as a result of medical errors. (These estimates, based on hospital disclosures, may in fact be two to three times higher, some physicians think.) Consulting multiple practitioners (for more complex ailments) drives the error rate up to 48%. It's not just about package labeling.
As Quaid detailed on 60 Minutes, when the actor entered his children's hospital room, he was shocked to see the thinned blood spurting from every one of the multiple needle puncture holes in the newborns' skin. The integrity of the four-day olds' skin been punctured by vaccinations, intravenous lines, recommended as "medically necessary" interventions, even in the first days of life yet opening the way to both blood outflow and incoming infection.
The newborns infants were prescribed blood thinning IVs because they had been placed on antibiotics due to the staph infection they contracted at the hospital.
Looking at all of this reveals the label and the lack of vigilance as secondary factors. The primary factors are the wide prevalence of infection in hospitals (and the declining efficacy of antibiotics to address them due to decades of over use.)
According to the Centers for Disease Control, the twins were just two of the two million people, who each year contract infections in hospital. Ninety thousand die from these infections annually.
So this is not about one bad apple nurse, package, or hospital.
According to the Harvard School of Public Health, 34% of people suffer a medical, medication, or lab error annually in the U.S. Our health care spending nearly doubles that of other first world countries, an international study found. Yet despite our costly care, the study authors wrote, "The United States often stands out for inefficient care and errors and is an outlier on access/cost barriers."
As overall costs rise, some can't afford the care they need, while those who can risk medical errors and infection. The myth that our medical care and our medical philosophy are the best in the world dies hard. But beware, the fix won't be found by enlarging the type or changing the label color-coding.
Quaid, like many people, still hopes that his doctors will win back his shattered trust by "taking the lead" to address medical errors. But our passive trust in the caring of an economically bound medical system is part of the problem.
Recently, a government and Merck-funded study of a so-called AIDS vaccine was scrapped because instead of conferring immunity, the vaccine increased the likelihood of contracting AIDS.
Like the failed vaccine, our highly interventionist approach to health is double-edged, carrying unintended dangers its' proponents prefer to ignore. The more you look at these dangers, the more health preservation, maintenance, and proactive approaches make sense.
For example, conventional medicine rejects simple ways to build immunity and increase the body's resistance to infection. Nor can it look critically at some of the common treatments that expose people to risk or undermine immune function. Natural products like colloidal silver and antibiotic herbs show great promise and lack harmful side effects. Building immunity through the use of probiotics is a good option.
But don't expect hospitals to lead the way out of the medical maelstrom. It's up to us. (For tips and action opportunities, please sign up for the Better Health Campaign at: www.health-journalist.com)