Lead Story
Cultural Diversity
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
According to a Reuters dispatch from Nigeria–where graft continues to be a way of life despite a government campaign to fight it–an official of the national soccer association told a seminar audience in March that referees should feel free to accept bribes as long as they don’t actually favor anyone while officiating the match.
In April the Ohio State Chiropractic Board filed charges against James Burda of Athens, saying that his use of a therapy he invented and calls Bahlaqeem constitutes malpractice. Burda claims he has the ability to realign bones by mentally “telling” them to change position and can travel back in time to treat an injury when it occurred; he also says on his Web site that there is no need for him and his patients to actually meet, as Bahlaqeem can be practiced long-distance via e-mail or phone.
In January surgeons in Orange, California, opened up the left side of a child’s skull to remove a brain tumor; unable to locate it, they checked the patient’s chart and discovered that the tumor was on the right side. Hospital officials said that the doctors had ignored elements of surgery protocol, failing to take a “time-out” to positively identify the incision site or to mark the skull before cutting. (The surgeons found and removed the tumor on the second try.) And in April hand surgeon Mary Ellen Beatty of Tampa, Florida, was suspended from practice and fined $20,000 for beginning an operation by cutting into the wrong finger; a state board assessed the particularly steep penalty because it was Beatty’s third such mistake since 2000.
