Woman's leg amputated by mistake following false cancer diagnosis

Saturday, November 28, 2009 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: leg amputation, medical error, health news

(NaturalNews) Word to the wise: Be careful of what doctors tell you to cut off following a cancer diagnosis. Submitting to cancer surgery can cost you an arm... or a leg.

Increasingly, cancer surgeons are recommending that woman have their healthy breasts surgically removed as a way to prevent cancer -- even when those women have no cancer! But recently, an even more bizarre story surfaced: According to a BBC report (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/w...), a UK woman had her leg amputated by a cancer surgeon who claimed her leg showed signs of a malignant cancer tumor. She naively agreed to undergo the surgery and awoke with quite a shock: Not only was her leg missing, but the doctor told her she never had cancer in the first place.

I'm trying to figure out who made the bigger goof here: The doctor who claimed there was cancer, or the patient who agreed to let a doctor amputate her leg without getting a second opinion...

Here's what the doctor reportedly said upon her regaining consciousness: "I've got a bombshell to tell you - I'm very sorry, but we shouldn't have taken the leg off."

At that point, I think the patient should have picked up that amputated leg and beat the snot out of the surgeon with it. But that's just me...

The finest medical care in the world

The leg amputation patient was offered a settlement of roughly US$158,000, much of which ended up being used to buy a prosthetic leg. This is how the medical system generates business these days: First they harm patients with one procedure (drugs, chemo or surgery), then they make even more money treating the harm they caused in the first place. It's quite a clever system for repeat business.

The Royal Orthopaedic Hospital, where this surgery took place, denied it had been negligent. (That must be some creative excuse-making.) The leg amputation was approved by "a group of clinical experts - three of them world-renowned in their particular fields," according to statements published by the BBC. (None of them lost their jobs over the incident.)

Is that a relief? It would be far more comforting to think this was a mistake made by bumbling idiots who had no idea what they were doing. But no, this leg amputation error was made by the best doctors and surgeons around! These are the smart ones!

I'd hate to think what some lesser-educated members of the medical profession might have done. Perhaps they would have resorted to the tactics of masochistic U.S. breast cancer surgeons and recommended that the women remove both legs just to make sure she never gets cancer there in the future.

And why stop at that? Chop off the arms, legs, testicles, breasts, colon and reproductive organs -- all just to make sure no cancer appears there. Soon, you're left with the Black Knight from Monty Python, a wiggling torso with an animated head that insists he's just fine and can still fight.

You gotta wonder, by the way, why this victim settled for a mere $158,000. Isn't your leg worth much more? I don't know about you, but I need both legs because there are still too many practicing cancer surgeons who need a good swift boot to the head!

Need a CT scan? Here's the "Hiroshima special..."

Oh, and just in case you think the craziness of modern health care is limited to surgeons who remove the wrong body parts, here's something else you need to know. As the LA Times reports:

"After Cedars-Sinai reset a CT scan machine in February 2008, more than 200 brain scans on potential stroke patients were performed at eight times the normal dose of radiation, the hospital says." (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ceda...)

So instead of getting a low-risk medical imaging test, patients who went to Cedars-Sinai got something more like a taste of Hiroshima and its radioactive fallout. CT scans, even when properly calibrated, are equivalent to receiving 100 chest X-rays (https://www.naturalnews.com/023582.html). Multiply that by eight -- as happened at Cedars-Sinai -- and you the equivalent of 800 chest X-rays worth of radiation all in one setting!

"Hey doctor, something's strange here. All these CT scans are showing the brains of these patients are completely fried! What should we do?"

Replies the doctor at Cedars-Sinai: "Don't worry about it. If these patients had any brains to begin with, they wouldn't be visiting us in the first place!"

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Editor's note: This story isn't meant to make light of the emotionally devastating leg amputation that victimized the particular patient referenced in this story. Rather, it is meant to draw attention, through satire, to the outrageous stupidity of a medical system that cuts off body parts rather than trying to heal them. Amputations and radiation over-exposures are no laughing matter. But the credibility of western medicine most certainly is.

Sources for this story include:
LA Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ceda...

BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/w...