Man dies after mistakenly having liver removed instead of spleen

After more than a decade of medical studies, how is it possible for a surgeon to confuse two organs during an operation? This is surely the question being asked by the family of a 70-year-old American man from Alabama who died on August 21 in a Florida hospital. The patient had initially gone to the emergency room for pain in his left flank. After several tests, the doctors told him that he had a cyst in his spleen, which needed to be treated as soon as possible.

An appointment was therefore made to perform the operation a few days later. A surgery that absolutely did not go as planned, according to the testimony of the family of the man, a certain William Bryan, collected by The Guardian. According to them, the specialist had simply confused two of the septuagenarian’s organs. After the operation, the surgeon explained to the deceased’s wife that her husband’s “spleen” was in such poor condition that the organ was four times larger than normal and had migrated to the right side of the man’s body.

Surgeon already accused of medical error

In reality, the healthcare professional removed the patient’s liver, which is actually located on the right side of the human anatomy, rather than his spleen. The family was also informed that William Bryan’s spleen, the source of his initial pain, had not moved one iota despite the operation and still had the small cyst on its surface. Proof, if any were needed, that the doctor had operated on the wrong organ. A fatal error, since the patient did not survive the operation.

Worse, the surgeon was not new to this, according to the family’s lawyer. He had already committed a medical error in 2023, by mistakenly removing part of a patient’s pancreas instead of operating on his adrenal glands. The family has decided to file a complaint against the practitioner.

This medical confusion is far from being an isolated case, recalls Science Alert. These events are nicknamed “never events”, or events that should never happen, because they are linked to largely avoidable medical or human errors. Examples include operations on the wrong organ or the wrong side of the body, but also the insertion of an incorrect prosthesis or the forgetting of surgical instruments or compresses in the body of patients.

Also read: Medical error in teleconsultation: complaint for involuntary manslaughter

What are the most common medical errors?

Confusion between the left and right sides of the human body remains the most common error factor in medical errors. In November 2023, for example, a patient treated for breast cancer at the Bretonneau University Hospital in Tours received 25 radiotherapy sessions on the wrong breast before doctors realized the error.

Radiological images are also sometimes placed upside down on the screen, which can lead to a healthy kidney being removed instead of a diseased organ. An American study identified that the surgical specialty most likely to perform operations in the wrong place is orthopedics (35% of cases of medical errors), followed by neurosurgery (22%) and urology (9%).

In some cases, healthcare professionals don’t just get the wrong side or organs, but the wrong patient. This is what caused a patient to die in a Bronx hospital in New York in 2018 after his ventilator was mistakenly removed, or the wrong patient to have an abortion when she came for a routine check-up in a Prague hospital in March 2024.