Safety Issue: Cumulative Dose Monitoring Essay Example

Cancer is one of the diseases strictly monitored by the medical society. Chemotherapy has been one of the developments in treating such kind of disease. The medical society then aims to improve this method thus improving the ways of fighting cancer as well.
The article talks about the incident at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, which is, according to the article, one of the most prestigious cancer hospitals in the country. These incidents were reported to have been caused by massive overdose of a chemotherapy drug called cyclophosphamide or Cytoxan that was used for an experimental procedure known as autologous stem-cell transplant, a variation of the more common bone marrow transplant. Of the two patients, one woman died while the other suffered irreversible heart damage. Both patients received four times the intended dosage.
The pressing issue in the article involves the medical practice of the staff who administered the drug to the patients. It was mentioned in the article that the dosage was counterchecked by various medical staff before it was administered. The issue would have been lighter if the mistake was committed by a single person. But in this case, one life was lost while the other suffered from irreversible damage. The experimental method should have taken the medical society one step forward in curing cancer but this incident cost them a lot of steps backward. Much of the public would have seen these incidents as carelessness on the staff’s part. Medical staffs are supposedly the ones that ensure the safety of the patients. It should have been ensured that all of the medical staff working in the experimental procedure has taken all necessary orientations about each and every procedure involved as well as the amounts of the drug to be administered. Also, before forwarding any calculated dosage of the drug, they should have reevaluated the dosage to ensure that there are no errors. For an experimental procedure to be successful, it should be noted that the aim is to cure and not to cause any more damage or death.