{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.018606663781912593, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004759844223279966, 'mean_word_length': 4.751243781094527, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
How to Do Responsibility: Apology and Medical Error

In a kind of hoary misreplication of the cancer diagnosis in which a patient is told he has only a short time to live before cancer kills him, a young man at Kaiser Permanente in San Jose man was recently told he had only three days to live after hospital staff mistakenly administered cancer treatment into his epidural shunt in place of another drug. Accidents involving toxic chemotherapy drugs have happened before, in other places, such as the highly publicized lethal overdose given to a young journalist of the Boston Globe a few years ago. 1 Chemotherapy drugs have evolved from nitrogen mustard gas, originally used as a chemical weapon. They have been used since the early 1940s in hospitals, and one might wonder, given the combination of the relatively long history of use and its extreme toxicity, why such seemingly avoidable errors happen with frequency. One could imagine that in many hospital settings, doctors will be rushed, nurses under-trained, and pharmacists sloppy. Indeed, mistakes in pharmaceutical delivery have been recorded for hundreds of years, and offer some of the earliest cases of the burgeoning area of law involving medical error in the nineteenth century. One might well ask why drugs aren't color-coded such that certain classes of drugs can go only into certain colors or designs of containers. One might wonder about designing epidural shunt systems that would differ from chemotherapy delivery ports, such that poison drugs only match one or other type of hook up, and thus a nurse would be unable to put the wrong genre of chemical into the wrong part of the body. One might consider this issue as an issue of design: of labeling, bottle shape, storage cupboard organization, as well as one of human error. Further, one can imagine this kind of systematic error—no one's fault and no one is noticing—all the way back into the delivery systems, drug manufacturing, and into basic research. How can we trust that the active ingredients are in the pills we take, or that the cell line with the right cancer is being used in the basic research? Some reports estimate that well over 100,000 people a year die in the United States due to medical errors—and these account for only immediate deaths, not short and long term