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	Archive > November, 2008	Vol. IX, No. 11

Editor's Page

Don't Reinvent the Wheel - Just Mark the Site

Dan O'Connor, Editor-in-Chief

Perhaps no act committed in the OR has been the subject of more scrutiny and study than that of the surgeon scribbling his initials in purple ink on the patient's skin to mark the surgical site. So simple a caveman could do it, right? And yet every year an estimated 1,300 to 2,700 wrong-site surgeries occur in the United States, many of them attributed to how the site was marked. Or wasn't.

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