The Jose King Story, Reaction Paper Example

Josie King was a little girl who died of a preventable problem to to the negligence of her doctors. This should make people think about how the way medicine has been structured in the United States. While the doctors who were taking care of King were all professionals who were well respected in their fields, and even had the best interests of the child at heart, they couldn’t prevent one of the most basic factors relating to a person’s health, dehydration.(Niedowoski, 2003)

The worst part about this incident is the fact that the child was admitted to the hospital with burns, which should have been routine for the hospital to treat. This tragedy shows that an in depth look at the current structure of our medical system should be taken. In modern society, it should be much more difficult for such a minor error to get past their attention. Even with the technology at hand, they were unable to prevent this. Now, more then ten years later, it seems that technology should be able to be implemented that would prevent these sorts of problems.

However, employing technology to fix the issue might be ignoring the point.  It seems that perhaps a deeper relationship between patients and their health care providers might be what is needed going into the future. As society advances, and people become more reliant on systems then on their own instincts, these sorts of problems may only become more prevalent, as technology continues to have its own issues, various bugs that need worked out, and so shouldn’t be relied too much.

Tragedies like this should be something that are prevented by society, especially one with the social, economic, and technological progress that ours has had.  With the money, the morality, and the technology, it shouldn’t be difficult to avoid such simplistic issues that occur in everyday life.

References

Niedowski, Erika. (2003). How Medical Errors Took a Little Girl’s Life. The Baltimore Sun. Retrieved from http://www.baltimoresun.com/bal-te.sorrel14dec14,0,2087857,full.story