Luckily no one was harmed.
He was proud of his handiwork and signed off on it. Have we enough skilled surgeons to remove them for a harmless boast? Reprimanded, sure, but removing him from his post is both an over reaction and unfair to society which is already lacking in skilled healthcare professionals.
If his ego/vanity changes the actions that he takes when performing surgery, that sounds like a problem to me.
If we're sticking to car analogies he wrote his name in the dirt on the back of a truck, but the dirt was abrasive and so he also scratched his initials into the paint.
That is, a patient who gets signed upon and one who doesn't following the exact same procedure for the rest are at an identical risk?
> Oxford student given suspended sentence for stabbing boyfriend
> Judge had reportedly earlier told Lavinia Woodward a prison term could damage her prospects of becoming a heart surgeon
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/sep/25/oxford-student-l...
It is part of a bad culture among medical doctors, where they both torture themselves and apparently others as well. The profession as a whole should really wake up or they will face a similar reaction as taxi drivers did with the introduction of Uber and Lyft. Nobody want’s to be forced to be a customer in businesses that supersede customer trust for ego.
Is it certain that a couple inches of laser beam scar tissue in a liver has not, and will not in the future cause any medical issues for the patients in question?
Even minor scarring adds to the bodies burden in healing, so I think it's hard to definitively say that the laser inscribed initials did not cause any harm or increased risk at all. After all, these were not strong, healthy people -- they were sick enough to require liver surgery... and one of them had to have followup treatment which is when the initials were discovered.
It could well lead to Cirrhosis of the liver. Not to mention Adhesion that could become painful. I'm not too sure how likely either issue is, however I wouldn't like to assume that scarring your liver is going to be completely free of complications... Though by the time you're having an intraoperative procedure done on your liver, you're already not free from complications.
Do you have any medical background ? Did you ever use a coagulator ? Or ever saw a liver with your own eyes and the eventual scars those get because of routinely occurring small infarctii or such ? I doubt so, as this is utter bullshit.
> I'm not too sure how likely either issue is
Not likely at all in this universe
Briefly, working as a theatre technician in coronary intervention. We used diathermy etc in the lab.
In this case he did it to a patient and the marks didn't heal. (By definition he works on patients who's livers are less likely to heal), but it didn't cause any further harm.