So this guy was traveling in Florida when he started feeling pain on his left side. He went to a local hospital where the doctors told him he needed to have his spleen removed. He said he’d prefer to consult with his own doctor, but the surgeon convinced him that the situation was urgent, so he underwent surgery.
After the surgery, the surgeon told his wife that her husband’s spleen “was so diseased that it was four times bigger than usual and had migrated to the other side of (his) body”. In fact, the surgeon had mistakenly removed the liver instead of the spleen, resulting in the patient’s death.
Now, is this error as egregious as it sounds? IANAD, but distinguishing a liver from a spleen sounds like something a first year medical student would learn to do. When the surgeon actually noticed that the “spleen” was far too large and was in the wrong place, wouldn’t he be expected to take a step back and confirm what he was looking at? Is it even possible for a spleen to “migrate” to the other side of the body? I know medical errors are not uncommon, but this one seems just ridiculous.
I am no medical professional by any means, but it seems like the surgeon may have had some sort of locked-in cognitive fallacy (similar to airplane pilots’ get-there-it-is or investigators who lock in on a suspect and ignore all others in a case). He was so fully determined to get rid of the organ he had in mind that even something that obviously appeared as a liver was rationalized away in his mind as “must be a spleen too big and in the wrong place.”
There’s already a thread relating to this . With that said, IANA any sort of medical professional, and I’m nearly certain I could tell the organs in question apart. IMO there is something very deeply wrong when a room full of medical professionals (who presumably had to pass anatomy classes to even BE there) collectively manage to get it wrong. The “surgeon” certainly was not the only person in the room with working eyes, and I’d be horrified if said “surgeon” was in possession of the highest-functioning brain present.
At least he has a wife that can sue. Under Florida’s “Free Kill” law if his next of kin were adult children or more distant relatives they wouldn’t have a right to sue.
Surgeons should be able to tell these organs apart. However, the information we have is from a lawyer and is not necessarily impartial or accurate.
Healthy liver and spleen look different and are in different locations. However, disease can change the size, appearance and differentiating characteristics between these two things. Obesity and unusual anatomical variations can make things more difficult. Surgeons certainly make mistakes, which can be aggravated by trainees, long hours, call responsibilities, responding to difficulties in a human way, volume load, nursing errors or other complications such as real or perceived errors in imaging.
I am not making excuses for obvious errors. Mistakes happen very often and serious errors more often than they should. But I would suggest we do not necessarily know all the details, and it might not have been as easy as one might think.
They were removing an organ for a reason; it was likely very unhealthy, and sometimes surgeons on seeing what is going on believe (rightly or wrongly) they need to do more or something else once they are in there. So it also may matter what the surgeon told the patient, if there is any reasonable explanation or it was simply negligent, etc.
Even if he thought he was seeing spleen, part of the point of surgery is that there are a lot of organs in there, and you want to make sure that you’re not damaging the ones you don’t want to damage. Would it have been normal for a doctor who wasn’t (he thought) working on the liver, to double-check that the liver was still OK when he was working near it?
. With that said, IANA any sort of medical professional, and I’m nearly certain I could tell the organs in question apart. IMO there is something very deeply wrong when a room full of medical professionals (who presumably had to pass anatomy classes to even BE there) collectively manage to get it wrong. The “surgeon” certainly was not the only person in the room with working eyes, and I’d be horrified if said “surgeon” was in possession of the highest-functioning brain present.