"Anesthesiologist trashes sedated patient — and it ends up costing her"

"These audio clips are excerpts from conversations between a gastroenterologist, an anesthesiologist and a medical assistant during a colonoscopy. This was entered as evidence in a lawsuit filed by the patient for defamation and medical malpractice."

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 said 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.

“I’ve never heard of a case like this,” said Lee Berlik, a Reston lawyer who specializes in defamation law. He said comments between doctors typically would be privileged, but the Vienna man claimed his recording showed that there was at least one and as many as three other people in the room during the procedure and that they were discussing matters beyond the scope of the colonoscopy.

“Usually, all [legal] publication requires is publication to someone other than the plaintiff,” Berlik said. “If one of the doctors said to someone else in the room that this guy had syphilis and tuberculosis and that person believed it, that could be a claim. Then it’s up to the jury to decide: Were the statements literal assertions of fact? The jury apparently was just so offended at this unprofessional behavior that they’re going to give the plaintiff a win. That’s what happens in the real world.” 

One of the jurors, Farid Khairzada, said that “there was not much defense, because everything was on tape.” He said that the man’s attorneys asked for $1.75 million and that the $500,000 award was a compromise between one juror who thought the man deserved nothing and at least one who thought he deserved more.

“We finally came to a conclusion,” Khairzada said, “that we have to give him something, just to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”

Ageism and the Colonoscopy don't test well

While looking for something to post this morning, via Insta, I came across a long New Republic article about "ageism" at Silicon Valley. I don't like the term "ageism", it has a phony connotation with me. How can you be accused of phobing the natural state of things? I mean, people get old and slow down. If you are young and vibrant, why charge you with the burden of consciously attending to the feelings of the old and slow? Isn't it enough that they, the young, are going to have to pay for our health care, Medicare, welfare, social security and ObamaCare?

Don't hold me to that list of who is paying what benefits, it's early in the morning and I don't have the luxury of time. I'm going to be 50 this year, and so, when I saw that NYT article about the dreaded turning-50 test (colonoscopy) I had to read it. I though I could tie it to the "ageism" article I mentioned above. It didn't work, it wouldn't work and it couldn't work, because I don't like either of them. I had nothing positive to bounce off of. Trying to uplift two things you don't agree with, or don't like, it's nearly impossible. I say nearly because I'm sure there is somebody who could ;)

I haven't had the colonoscopy, so I don't necessarily have the experience of saying I don't like it because I went and lay down, on my side, trough it. But, according to what I read in the article, it's invasively uncomfortable. There is no going under either.

Hence,  I'll just leave you with a short from the long article of the subtle scourge of "ageism" at Silicon Valley.

Over lunch it became clear that Stamos (a startup entrepreneur) is preoccupied with age—not so much his own, but with the way his industry fetishizes kids with little insight into the questions he considers worthy. At one point, he complained that “listening is a really hard skill for young folks.”

Stamos is fond of telling a story about sitting down with an engineer whom an acquaintance had referred to him for advice. “I meet with the kid and he’s twenty-one, twenty-two,” Stamos recalls. “He was smart. A Harvard computer-science major.” The kid said he’d already done two start-ups and was looking to try a third. His previous venture was a website where women could enter their medical information and find out which one of hundreds of birth-control pills suited them best, with the least amount of side effects. The website would arrive at the answers by trawling bulletin boards and chat rooms across the Web and learning from other people’s experiences.

“Really, you got this funded?” Stamos asked. Yes, said the kid. “But it obviously didn’t work out,” Stamos replied. Right, said the kid. At which point Stamos began to piece together what must’ve happened. “You collected the data and realized a lot of the data out there is horrible, and you couldn’t make sense of it,” he said. The kid allowed that this was true. “You probably talked to CVS—everyone talks to CVS. And they thought it was the best thing since sliced cheese, but they were never willing to buy it.” Again the kid said yes. “Then you realized that anything you’re doing that has to be regulated, like making medical recommendations, requires FDA approval.” By now the kid was demanding to know how Stamos had guessed all of this. “You see these gray hairs?” he said. “It’s the classic model everyone goes through. I know it from Phase Forward.”