What can cancer patients do to protect themselves from malpractice in radiation therapy? This urgent question arises from a lengthy series of investigative reports in the New York Times. The articles exposed serious patient injuries that stem from therapists who are overwhelmed and inexperienced, lax regulation and indifference by hospital administrators.
A key part of the problem is that technological sophistication has outrun the ability of the humans running the radiation machines to monitor the safety of the radiation beams they train on patients’ bodies.
Another issue is that no central agency is responsible for inspecting the machines and credentialing the people who run them. Depending on the type of radiation involved, the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and various state health agencies could have jurisdiction. Or worse, each could claim that someone else has the jurisdiction, and the patient can slip through the cracks.
There is one simple way that patients can take some measure of self-protection. That is to make sure that the radiation therapy center treating you has significant experience, in years not months, with the specific machine being used on you. Too often, hospital administrators buy a fancy new machine, advertise it heavily in glossy brochures, but don’t take the time to make sure the machine is properly calibrated and that the medical physicists who operate the machine are fully trained.
You should also ask if the machine treating you has been inspected recently by an independent agency. One federally funded inspection and testing service is the Radiological Physics Center, operated out of MD Anderson Hospital in Houston. It does inspections for any radiation center that wants to receive federal funding for clinical trials. The Center found in 2008 that nearly three in ten hospitals it inspected failed to accurately irradiate a test dummy using IMRT technology.
The Times also found rampant problems with fake credentials among medical physicists, who are in charge of making sure patients get the right dose of radiation. The American Board of Radiology certifies medical physicists in one of three sub-specialties. You can check if a physicist is certified at the umbrella website for all medical board certifications, the American Board of Medical Specialties. Click here to go to the login page to search for a medical physicist’s certification. The same page will let you search for whether a doctor is board-certified in any of the ABMS specialties or sub-specialties.
Also, the American Board of Medical Physics runs some certification programs. Its website has lists of diplomates but lacks any searchable database of qualified physicists. So the ABMS website is a better choice.
I recommend that patients ask questions to find out the qualifications of the persons running your radiation treatment program. If they lack certification, why take a chance?
I discuss the certification issue in detail in my book, “The Life You Save: Nine Steps to Finding the Best Medical Care — and Avoiding the Worst.” Many of the most egregious cases of malpractice that I have prosecuted for victims’ families have involved doctors who lacked basic board certifications. Click here for more information on the kinds of malpractice cases we work on.