![]() ![]() When the answer doesn't come instantly, participants described various techniques, from making an L shape with their thumb and index finger, to thinking about which hand they use to write, or strum a guitar. "First of all, you have to orient right from left in yourself," he says. "But others have to go through a process." In an effort to understand what happens in wrong-sided medical errors, Gormley and his colleagues have conducted research on medical students' experience of making left-right decisions and examined the process. "Some individuals can tell right from left innately, just can do it without thinking," says Gerard Gormley, a GP and clinical professor at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. In fact, researchers are only just beginning to get to the bottom of exactly what's going on in our brains when we do it – and why it's much easier for some people than others. Left-right discrimination is actually quite a complex process, calling upon memory, language, visual and spatial processing, and mental rotation. "It's because of the symmetry, and because when you turn around, it's the other way around, and that makes it so confusing." But telling left from right is different, she says. "Nobody has difficulty in saying front and back, or top and bottom," says Ineke van der Ham, professor of neuropsychology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Even for those who believe they have no issues, distractions such as ambient noise, or having to answer unrelated questions, can get in the way of making the right choice. While for some people, telling left from right is as easy as telling up from down, a significant minority – around one in six people, according to a recent study – struggle with the distinction. These " never events" – serious and largely preventable patient safety accidents – highlight that, while most of us learn as children how to tell left from right, not everyone gets it right. Preventable medical mistakes frequently involve wrong-sided surgery: an injection to the wrong eye, for example, or a biopsy from the wrong breast. The man had a trapped nerve in his arm that required an operation – but after making a midline incision in his neck, Marsh had drilled out the nerve on the wrong side of his spinal column. When British brain surgeon Henry Marsh sat down beside his patient's bed following surgery, the bad news he was about to deliver stemmed from his own mistake. ![]()
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