High schooler dies in ACL surgery. How does that happen?

John Utah wrote:

surgery is serious serious business

people act like it's nothing

Exactly. That's why you have to sign those waivers going in.

Karl Hungus wrote:

Doctors make medical errors. Anesthesiology isn’t 100%. Patient could have had some undiagnosed disease. Pick your choice.

Their medical insurance premiums are going to skyrocket.

But once there is free medical care provided by the gummint, the family gets nothing.

Do not believe in coincidence wrote:

Joan Rivers ended up dead after routine plastic surgery. Coincidentally after she called Michelle Obama a tranny. Maybe these two had information that could lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton?

Heh-heh. She made us laugh by dying.

If only Kathy Griffin would.

A different doctor wrote:

What do you think is most likely here? Reaction to anesthesia (malignant hyperthermia), or something else?

Who knows and the truth may never come out. Because when the lawsuits start rolling in on this tragic death, the medical system will put forth every effort to protect it's Empire.

Keep in mind: Medical error is now the *3rd* leading cause of death in the U.S.! (behind heart disease & cancer).

More than *250,000* deaths annually are attributed to medical error!

The system is in dire straits; you can't have over a QUARTER OF A MILLION people die annually from medical error and just keep on doing business as if nothing is wrong! Where's the accountability here?

And medical drugs play a big role here: There's so many FDA-approved drugs that are unsafe that kill & maim people at an astonishing rate and nobody really cares. And as long as Pharma can get their industry-funded studied drugs approved for use and start raking in the Billions of dollars of profit, they could care less about the deaths & serious adverse events occuring to the patients on these pharmaceuticals!

You have to feel bad for the nurses, techs, therapists, etc. and most doctors - I believe they are really trying to help their patients. But they all work for a system that's in complete disarray:

theJeff wrote:

his will? wrote:

Surprised you are questioning this.

Surprised you don’t realize I am taking a guess at the CoD.

You know who did it.

Stop saying that. That came from a very very flawed "study"

https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/26/5/423

Medical System Destruction wrote:

You have to feel bad for the nurses, techs, therapists, etc. and most doctors - I believe they are really trying to help their patients. But they all work for a system that's in complete disarray:

I find these kind of arguments to be very polarizing. For sure the medical "system" we have is not perfect. For example I find most sports doctors I encountered were not at all effective when it came to dealing with running injuries. However, were I to be seriously injured in a car wreck or something some people would arrive fairly quickly in an ambulance and take me to hospital where a medical team would be doing their all to save my life. I am still grateful that a medical system at least exists even if it is not perfect. Surgical procedures will always carry a risk unfortunately. With the recent advances in science it may now be the role of science (better funding is likely needed for this profession) to try and better understand genetic variants involved in the responses to anesthesia and maybe the risk of surgery could be reduced by some sort of genetic screening prior to operations.

Someone dies in a routine surgery, is like a plane crashing. It is very rare. But, it does happen. When it does, it makes the news. There were probably 3000 successful ACL surgeries in the country that week, and no one cares. It is very sad and unfortunate that this happened. But, no surgery is 100% guaranteed to be successful.

Tristate wrote:

Someone dies in a routine surgery, is like a plane crashing. It is very rare. But, it does happen. When it does, it makes the news. There were probably 3000 successful ACL surgeries in the country that week, and no one cares. It is very sad and unfortunate that this happened. But, no surgery is 100% guaranteed to be successful.

Yeah...and I wonder how many knee surgeries are not successful. We will never hear much about those cases unless it's a celebrity or professional athlete or something along those lines. In this case at least Floyd didn't suffer a tragic death:

Not to sabotage this whole thread....but you just brought up the biggest "issue" with the whole health care system. How do you pay for it? Could anesthesia risk as well as the risk for sudden-death be reduced with further testing....probably. Every child could have screening for congenital cardiomyopathies with ECHO's as part of the sports physical, every patient could have an EKG/ECHO/MH testing prior to elective surgery. All of these things could theoretically reduce sudden death and death related to surgery (although studies don't necessarily support this); but who pays for it? Insurance companies won't pay for this screening. A single-payer health care system (Europe/Canada for example ) will certainly not pay for it. The bottom line is that every medical system does have problems...but the cost of healthcare is the biggest hurdle that all systems have to address.

Regarding this actual case...the rumor on anesthesia sites is Malignant Hyperthermia. MH can be tested for preoperatively with a muscle biopsy; but NO institution routinely tests for MH.