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tayl0r | 13 years ago
German hospitals make mistakes too, it's not just in the US.
My premature daughter was born in Berlin and she had club feet (which was already known since you can detect it from the sonogram).
Because our daughter was premature and had to stay in the hospital for 6 weeks, we couldn't go to the professional orthopedic doctor (who has treated hundreds of babies with club feet) since he was off-site. We had to let the on-site orthopedic doctor treat her.
Everyone at the hospital said, "He [the on-site doctor] is great, he has treated club feet before, he knows what he is doing." etc.
So, we let him treat our daughter for 6 weeks while she was the hospital. Every 3 or 4 days she got new casts on her feet.
When our daughter was finally released we took her to the real orthopedic doctor and he took one look at the casts and just laughed. "These casts look like they are from treatments from the 60s, this is not how anyone has treated club feet in decades." He put new casts on her and it was like night and day watching him work- he was a master at putting the casts on compared to the previous doctor.
The good doctor also said he has seen this happen many times before with babies from our hospital. They do the club feet casts wrong all the time and yet nothing ever happens. They don't improve, they don't get trained in how to do it, they don't even get told "DON'T DO IT" when no treatment would have been better than bad treatment. It's infuriating to know that these bad doctors can just keep being bad and no one does anything about it.
Our daughter also had to stay in the hospital for an extra day because they "forgot" to tell us we could take her home.
And these are just the mistakes we know about.
At least the whole experience was 100% free. No copays, no deductibles, nothing. I can't imagine how much all this would cost in the US.
tisme|13 years ago
If nobody tells them they might continue to believe it. Likely they have your daughters case chalked up as a success.