A surgeon was found liable for leaving a needle in a patient
“Heymann had called Iraci in to help him find the needle, and the two doctors spent hours searching for it, eventually closing up Faas’ abdomen without locating it.”
Those must have been anxious hours trying the find that needle.
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{ 3 comments }
I guess we need to know more facts in the case to see if his health is actually “at great risk.”
This is an incredibly unfortunate story, if Dr. Heymann really did spend considerable time and effort trying to find the needle but I think it qualifies as malpractice.
I’m unsure why he wasn’t up front with the patient concerning the potential that there was a needle inside of him and if he was does this damage the claim that good patient communication helps defer potential lawsuits?
I completely sympathize with this doctor and the patient. The simple fact is that needles break, and sometimes at the worst possible times in the most difficult to reach places. And sometimes they simply can’t be found, despite diligent efforts to look for them, including radiographically.
This is a complication of surgery. The doctor has to do his best to look, that is to be expected, as long as the searching does no additional harm. I do not think, as the poster above and the misguided jury thought, that this makes for malpractice. Telling the patient is prudent, but is irrelevant to the issue of malpractice.
Unbelievable. A fragment of a surgical grade needle in the liver, and this guy thinks it is “killing” him.
A doctor should ony be blamed (ie. found to be at fault) for something if he clearly could do the procedure or test another way that would have prevented the mishap, or if he did something not supported by the literature and which then caused harm.
There is little any doctor can do to prevent needles breaking (except to stop being a doctor/surgeon). This doc did everything humanly possible to try and rectify the complication – he searched for hours, and even called another doc to help search. Exactly what could he have done differently? Turn into a god and locate the needle psychokinetically?
It’s a known complication of surgery that occurs in the best hands, no matter what.
If a patient can’t live with the risks that any procedure brings with it, he shouldn’t expect it’s benefits. Stay home with your hernia.
In a saner world, a no fault system will compensate these patients a reasonable sum for such unavoidable complications. But in this world, somone has to be found “guilty” of wrongdoing. So they pile on the innocent party: the doc.
PS. To the first anonymous: why are you saying the doc never informed the patient? There’s absolutely no impression given in the article that that is what happened. In fact, everything suggests the exact opposite: a surgical grade needle is stuck in liver parenchyma is so unlikely to cause problems that he could not possibly have known unless his doc told him it happened, no?
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