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The story
A medical error has come to light at Ichinomiya Municipal Hospital in Aichi Prefecture, where surgeons operated on the leg that wasn’t broken and implanted an artificial bone in it. The mix-up was discovered during a post-operative X-ray, and the hospital settled by paying 5.5 million yen in damages. On 5ch, alongside shocked reactions like “how does a mistake like that even happen,” many users shared their own habits of marking the correct leg before surgery and personal stories of left-right mix-ups, while others questioned why no measures exist to prevent this from happening again.
Published 8/26 (Wed) 5:27 PM
CBC Television
Ichinomiya Municipal Hospital in Aichi Prefecture operated on the wrong leg, and has agreed to settle by paying 5.5 million yen in damages.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
When I went to the JSDF Central Hospital, they casually mixed up left and right on my X-ray too.
Apparently if they don't, there's a real risk of ending up bedridden.
They actually do that already.
Unbelievable… even that old 'Turn the Indian to the right' mistranslation meme (a famous Windows dialog-box translation blunder) at least got 'right' correct.
'Femoral neck fracture.' Both legs now — will she even be able to walk again?
The doctor in charge just got it backwards lol
And went ahead with the surgery anyway lol
Fully convinced his own mistake was the truth the whole time lol
Looking from the feet, it's the right
Looking from the pillow side, it's the left
Looking from the side, it's… whichever's closer
Barbershops too, honestly.
Read Re: #1, lol
It's already a done deal lol
If the fracture site had gone necrotic, worst case they'd have had to amputate the whole leg — that would've given it away eventually. Actually, the tech who took the post-op X-ray must've been the most shaken. You take the pre-op X-ray, confirm the fracture, then take the post-op X-ray and there's an artificial femoral head sitting in the opposite leg.
So… was the doctor drinking on the job or something?
Both legs looked kind of worn out to the naked eye anyway lol
Let's just go with that story lol
Big bones are important organs. An artificial bone loses that function entirely. The downsides massively outweigh any so-called benefit.
Why even use a stool for something out of reach… I really don't want to get that careless when I'm old.
Oh, so she's bedridden either way? I assumed the surgery was so she could walk again.
Nurse: 'Um, doctor, that's the wrong side—'
Doctor: 'Never mind, just be quiet.'
Something like that, probably.
In my case, the radiology tech was on the phone furiously protesting, explaining why the scan couldn't be done — but the doctor forced it through anyway, and I got put into the MRI with a metal halo vest still bolted to my head. I passed out three seconds in and they had to stop the scan. The doctor faced zero consequences. That's when I saw what the medical profession is really like.
Dyne… you're still alive?
They can — and they do. Depending on how the bone broke, they remove the section that's lost blood flow, shape the cut surface at the fracture site, insert the artificial femoral head, and fuse it to the patient's own bone.
So they do check the fracture site — just after it's already been removed.
Background and Key Points
Ichinomiya Municipal Hospital is a public general hospital in Ichinomiya, Aichi Prefecture, one of many mid-sized municipal hospitals that handle routine orthopedic trauma for Japan’s rapidly aging population. The injury involved, a femoral neck fracture, is a break at the narrow “neck” of the thighbone that typically severs its blood supply, meaning the bone cannot heal on its own; the standard treatment for elderly patients is a hemiarthroplasty, replacing the femoral head with an artificial implant, because leaving it untreated risks permanent bedridden status or death from complications of immobility. Surgical site marking, drawing a circle or X on the correct limb before surgery, is a well-established safety step in Japanese hospitals as elsewhere, and the hospital confirmed to posters that this procedure was in fact followed here.
The thread’s real disagreement was less about the mix-up itself, which most treated as baffling but explicable, and more about the money: several posters argued 5.5 million yen is far too low given that the patient now needs a second, corrective surgery on top of the original fracture, an added ordeal for an elderly body, and one poster raised the more sympathetic view that a hospital which came forward instead of quietly redoing the operation deserves some credit.
What the thread doesn’t spell out is that this was not a “free” fix on the healthy leg: an artificial hip is a functional loss, not a bonus, since it replaces living, self-repairing bone with a fixed implant, and the untreated fracture on the correct leg still awaits its own operation.
*This article is compiled and summarized from excerpts of the 5ch (Breaking News Plus) thread “[Left/Right] Wrong Leg Operated On… Medical Error Implants ‘Artificial Bone’ in Non-Fractured Leg, Discovered via Post-Op X-ray, Ichinomiya Municipal Hospital, Aichi.”
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