How Common Is It for Doctors to Confuse Left and Right?
Most of us have, at one point in our life, confused left and right. Some even may do it frequently.
A common situation for left-right confusion is driving in a car and the person in the passenger seat says, “Make a left turn here!” but the driver turns to the right. This is especially common when the driver is stressed out or under time pressure.
Left-right confusion in everyday life is mostly harmless. However, there are situations in which left-right confusion can have severe or even fatal consequences. For example, if a doctor confuses left and right during surgery this can have severe consequences for the patient. This can happen during a lot of different surgeries, most commonly during amputations of arms or legs. For example, if someone is scheduled to get an amputation of their left leg and the surgeon confuses left and right, the healthy right leg may get taken off instead of the left. Other surgeries during which left-right confusion can have severe consequences for the patient are surgeries on paired sensory organs like eyes and ears, or surgeries on paired internal organs such as kidneys, ovaries, and lungs wings. For example, if someone suffers from lung cancer and has a malignant tumor in the left........
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