Over on the website of Information Impact (Larry P. English’s consulting firm) a list of “Publicly exposed IQ Problems” is maintained. Occasionally we like to pop over and see what Larry’s people have spotted in the media that we might have missed.

One that got the (male) administrator of this site right in the *ahem* was the story of a US Army veteran who had the wrong testicle removed in a Veterans Administration Hospital. It seems that a chain of small errors resulted in the surgeon confidently and competently removing the wrong gonad. Gonad… I’d goMad.

The interesting thing on the USA Today blog site is that in the related stories they link to a Washington Post story that says that “wrong site surgery” (in other words accidentally cutting off perfectly functioning body parts or the right part off the wrong person) could be up to 20 times more common than previously thought. However they also link to a press release from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (an American organisation) detailing a study that shows wrong site surgery to be less common than previously thought.

This contradiction in statistics is itself an IQ Trainwreck – either there is a problem which should be addressed with expidition or there isn’t a problem. The fact that reliable information appears not to be available (perhaps through non-reporting of the issue in some cases) means that the ‘customers’ of healthcare services in the US don’t have information that meets, let alone exceeds, their expectations.

At least the two reports agree that these errors are preventable.

Of course wrong site surgery never happens outside the USA. Apart from:

the Irish man who had his stomach removed in error due to a mix up in tissue samples (no, that is not the set up to a humorous punchline). In this case doctors went to the extent of sending the tissue samples to an outside laboratory to get the diagnosis confirmed before operating (a 21 year old man was diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer). However the defect in the process/information had occured so early in the chain of events that their ‘stop and check’ actions simply confirmed the incorrect diagnosis leading to an extreme result for the young man in question.