Poor Dennis Quaid....

Last Sunday night, 60 Minutes aired the heart-wrenching story of how a hospital mistake almost caused the death of the Quaid's newly born twin daughters.

Dennis told the story of how the mix-up occurred: It seems as though the newborns were kept at the hospital overnight because of a possible staph infection--(a hospital favorite, BTW: both the iatrogenic staff infection and wanting to keep babies "for observation" in house over night). While there, the docs kept the babies on continuous IV anti-biotics. (Welcome home, new immune system!!). Since, of course, we wouldn't want the little one's IV tubes a cloggin' by the bodies natural defenses, they were given Heparin.

Here's where the fun really began! Instead of giving the newborn babies the usual dose of 10 units of Heparin each, they gave them the adult dose of 10,000 units each!! Needless to say, the babies bodies did not like that. They bled from every pore and opening: The umbilicus, noses, ears, eyes, etc. Blood spurted out to the walls!

When the Quaids showed up the next day, the infants were near death. And get this: The hospital didn't even call the parents!! And then the staff said "...well, it's a good thing they were in the hospital when this happened..."

What?? WHAT?!!

That's the reason they almost died, you idiots!!

The Quaids have started a foundation to make the public aware that medical mistakes are very prevalent. Too little, too late, I say. It's unfortunate that something has to happen to a celebrity before anyone notices or cares. Here are the facts:

More people die each year in the United States from medical errors than from highway accidents, breast cancer or AIDS, a federal advisory panel reported this year.

The report from the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine cited studies showing between 44,000 and 98,000 people die each year because of mistakes by medical professionals.
"That's probably an underestimate for two reasons," noted Dr. Donald Berwick of the Institute of Medicine.
"One is, there are many different kinds of errors we never learn about -- even in retrospective studies -- because they are never written down. And second, these studies did not include other areas of care like home care, nursing homes and ambulatory care centers," Berwick said.

The groundbreaking report urged Congress to create a National Center for Patient Safety within the Department of Health and Human Services to set goals for avoiding medical mistakes, track progress in meeting them and to fund research on better ways to prevent such errors.

Actually, most of these involve drugs. As the title ABOVE states: MEDICINE IS KILLING US!!

hEALTH aNGEL