Your pleasant personality comes forth.

Yes, we are all deities, here. You say so yourself.

No doubt your pleasant demeanor must color and inform your life beyond these flickering pages. Sad for you, really. It no doubt has closed your mind already.

Whether I am an ortho or attorney or anything else is immaterial to the discussion. You can save the MDiety act for the next patient you butcher and have to apologize to in order to not get your pants sued off.

Please inform us with your on-high opinion of when it is acceptable to perform a wrong limb surgery. It is beyond amazing to see anyone try to justify this blatant malpractice. It is providers with your form of enabling attitude that gives the whole profession a bit of a rotten stench when it comes to standards and accountability.

There really should be no excuse for these wrong side surgeries.

You are probably not an orthopedist, so your opinion is not that of an expert.

I suppose whether there is a defense for this will depend to some degree on the professional opinion of the counsel representing the defendant. Are you, dear poster that person. Probably not.

So what exactly are we to make of your “opinion”. It is nothing more than a blogger opinion by someone neither an orthopedist (I am supposing here, you didn’t claim to be an orthopedist) nor an attorney.

Hypothetically, under what conditions would a wrong limb surgery by an orthopedist be acceptable (in terms of its occurence)?

My view is that under no conditions would such an event be acceptable. There is no defense for this. One would suspect that other providers would not tolerate this form of easily corrected malpractice… but then it is perahps easier and far more pallatable to pass negative secundum res judgement on the patients and the trial lawyers then to suggest that the work of a colleague might not be up to par.

In the end it is not about having a lot of people in agreement about a few hearsay facts, but having reasonable primary sources available to double check. That is it doesn’t mean crap to have legions of people check that the patient-surgeon follie a dieu (pardon my french spelling) are in agreement with each other. The verifying team of nurses and anesthesiologist needs all other primary data to review such as office charts, x-rays (clearly labeled for laterality, not the usual microprint for left/right) and any other data that could support or refute the lateralizing diagnosis.

I can help insure that you get the procedure you agreed to with the surgeon. As it stands with medical informatics as they presently exist though, I cannot do much to be certain that you get the procedure you need.

God knows that news story is terribly biased.

Making judgements about someone’s intelligence or skill based on incomplete information serves only to show how lacking the finger-pointer is, not the person he is pointing his finger at.

Irrelevant and not the subject at hand.

The attorney says “two wrongs, etc”. Nice sound bite, but is it true? What is the second wrong, operating on the side of the intended surgery, the one that was consented for? Even if he made a mistake, if it is feasable to do the correct side without exposing the patient to the risk of a second anaesthetic, why is it wrong to do so? The story reports the patient being inconvenienced by having two operative sites in recovery, rather than one. Maybe true. But also equally reasonable is the claim that the surgeon tried to mitigate the damage by at least doing the surgery to the intended knee at the same OR session. If he didn’t charge for the error procedure (and who knows, perhaps the same procedure was planned on the opposite side, just not on that day) where does the claim of greed come in? Lawyer bluster to the press, fishing for a settlement. I for one would be curious to see the office chart.