A male patient reported for his routine colonoscopy, knowing that after the procedure he would probably be groggy at best. So he initiated his cellphone record function to be certain to capture the doctor’s report after the procedure.
But as soon as he pressed play on his way home, he found that he had recorded the entire examination and that the surgical team had mocked and insulted him as soon as he drifted off to sleep.
In addition to their derisive jokes, the doctors discussed avoiding the man after the colonoscopy, instructing an assistant to lie to him, and then placed a false diagnosis on his chart.
“After five minutes of talking to you in pre-op,” the anesthesiologist told the sedated patient, “I wanted to punch you in the face and man you up a little bit,” she was recorded saying.
When a medical assistant noted the man had a rash, the anesthesiologist warned her not to touch it, saying she might get “some syphilis on your arm or something,” then added, “It’s probably tuberculosis in the penis, so you’ll be all right.”
When the assistant noted that the man reported getting queasy when watching a needle placed in his arm, the anesthesiologist remarked on the recording, “Well, why are you looking then, retard?”
The man sued the two doctors and their practices for defamation and medical malpractice and, last week, after a three-day trial, a Fairfax County jury ordered the anesthesiologist and her practice to pay him $500,000. The jury awarded the man $100,000 for defamation — $50,000 each for the comments about the man having syphilis and tuberculosis — and $200,000 for medical malpractice, as well as the $200,000 in punitive damages. Though the remarks by Ingham and Shah perhaps did not leave the operating room in Reston, experts in libel and slander told the Washington Post that defamation does not have to be widely published, merely said by one party to another and understood by the second party to be fact, when it is not.
The anesthesiologist, Tiffany M. Ingham, 42, could not be reached for comment, the jury found that her practice should pay $50,000 of the $200,000 in punitive damages it awarded.
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