I’m not here to argue just have a conversation, though i can get a bit adversarial at times, though my intentions are in a good place, so if you think i was being harsh then i apologize.
Where my frame of mind in the matter goes is this: What if a loved one of mine undergoes a procedure and some asshole surgeon decides it’d be funny to burn his initials inside them? I would be livid and i would want to do whatever it took it never happened again.
I think we’re both probably remembering this…
Many years ago I had to have a small ganglion cyst excised from the palm of my hand. Out-patient stuff, and I was conscious for the procedure. As the surgeon began to cut away, one of the attending nurses said, “Look, Doctor. You carved your initial.” An “S” for his last name. I had no problem with that since, upon inspection later on, I could see that he was following my palm prints as much as possible at the excision location, and that to make any scar unnoticeable. That was nice of him.
No problem at all. I was being silly and appreciate others when they are respectful to others as you are… Thanks for being thoughtful.
Steve
This I agree with. I’d find it quite cheeky myself, all he has to do is ask me beforehand. In which case I’d say no initials, but please etch “if found, please give this to someone at the bottom of the list for transplant recipients”
F*CK. That is not okay and in my mind rape.
Medically unnecessary, unrelated, undisclosed, nonconsensual penetration of peoples genitalia is pretty messed up. If you were under at the dentist to get your tooth pulled and that happened, people would go to jail, there really isn’t any difference.
that would be one f’ed up prank.
how out of touch would a surgeon have to be to not know that branding and marking someone has a long dark history in abusive, power over, relations. It is something some people do to claim “ownership” over other people to degrade them and identify them as property.
also, there are lots of things they could do that wouldn’t cause any “physical harm” while they are unconscious that would be completely illegal and abusive. Consent is the issue.
this.
Well good thing it isn’t up to you then! 
Ok, so it appears that the general consensus here is that even though what he did was not actually physically harmful, and for all intents and purposes was invisible except under a very specific set of circumstances, and probably not even permanent(I would imagine that the liver grows and renews itself, but I truthfully don’t know about that), that he should be punished as if he had done something much more horrible.
While I don’t think he should have done it, I am not personally bothered by this idea at all. I have spent all day imagining graffiti on my internal organs.
He violated the trust of his patients and used his position that trust gave him to alter their bodies without their knowledge or consent.
I can’t even with this…
i think at minimum he should have to appear before an ethical review committee and they should decide what punishment and what sort of reparations are in order as well as review what policies the hospital has in place regarding this type of conduct.
I think it is up to the victims if this should go to legal court or civil court as well.
The surgeon, similar to some here, is likely surprised by the number of people that think this behavior is unacceptable and a violation. That is why one can’t just assume what is acceptable to others and should have their consent first, especially in a situation where you are unconscious and placing a huge amount of trust in the people working on you.
One might not consider that there are people who have religious beliefs that they shouldn’t mark their bodies. There are people who have experienced specific traumas. There are countless reasons others can have to not want this done to them that I sure this doctor didn’t consider in his hubris.
I don’t know how he could have possibly thought it would be acceptable. He had a job to do, he did it. He’s working on a human being.
He’s not working on building and leaving his initials buried inside the walls. If I knew that, not only I having suffered the trauma associated with a major organ transplant, the surgeon decided to “mark” his work inside me, I would feel violated.
He indelibly “marked” this human being. Branding humans without consent on the outside or the inside is unacceptable.
Just out of curiosity, has anyone here had an organ transplant?
What it is is this: A doctor has a strict rule of conduct, of ethics, and they carry a lot of trust from their patients and the patients’ family. To go and do something juvenile and unauthorized with them while operating is a betrayal that is not to be taken lightly. Also it is an indicator that said surgeon is highly likely to have done unauthorized things to patients many times. Thatthey happened to get caught this one time? That the surgeon only did it once and they happened to be caught while that patient was being operated on at a different hospital? I’m sorry cosmic coincidences like that don’t exist. It’s a numbers game, he did it enough that he got caught red handed (pun intended). I would never trust that doctor to do surgery on anyone i know.
Well, exactly. I’ve never maintained that what he did was ok. So what he did was “wrong” because some people will be irrationally upset about what he did, failing to understand how a person would react to it, or not really caring, was narcissistic and/or ignorant, and in this particular type of situation, violation of trust is of a greater importance than in other social situations.
If the majority of people felt like I did, and did not care about the cosmetic appearance of an internal organ that is not visible to themselves, or anyone else, and is not threatened by the idea of a person that spent several years of their life learning a rare, extremely important life-saving skill, and just used said skill to extend my life while I was completely unconscious, leaving an all but invisible, completely harmless, memento of the extremely difficult, high-pressure job he just finished, people would be saving their eye-rolls for the minority of people that are upset about it, instead of me.
I think that this person was punished for the idea of what he could have done , and the various extrapolated interpretations of the symbolic meaning of his actions, rather than what he actually did. I am not certain that’s justifiable, or even an effective way to think about things.
Try again.
For a doctor the first thing they learn is Do No Harm. And they can in fact lose their license to practice for violating that. What they can and can’t do is very well defined and rigid. You can’t go do whatever you want to a patient because you feel a need to “sign off” on your work on/in their body.
And like i said in my post right above yours (that you’ve ignored), the doctor got caught doing this. He felt comfortable doing it in full view of other doctors and nurses, it’s representative of his character and that he’s willing to not follow protocol. Is that the kind of surgeon you want to trust with your life? A surgeon that has likely done this to likely many other patients?
Sorry but if it were up to me that surgeon would never practice again.
Let me put it this way: Would you trust a public servant known for taking bribes once? Would you hire a someone to work on your home known for being dishonest to another customer? Do you want a surgeon to do non-trivial surgery on a loved one that is known for taking liberties in the operating room? If you say yes to any of those then i don’t know what to say to you.
That’s the thing, though. I wouldn’t be afraid to let this guy operate on me, or a family member, if he was a skilled, successful surgeon otherwise. I don’t believe that he is some sort of raging sociopath whose behavior was going to escalate into Bob knows what, and I don’t think you can draw that conclusion based on his actions. It is easy for me to see how he could rationalize doing such a thing, without him also being some kind of monster. It is also easy for me to see that some(most?) people would be upset about this being done to them, even though it is objectively harmless. Subjectively it is not harmless, which is why he shouldn’t have been doing it. In the case of my own subjectivity, the idea of this doesn’t upset me. The only attribute of my liver that is important to me is its functionality.
I haven’t been willfully ignoring you, or anyone else, I read everyone’s comments, whether they are directed at me or not, but since most people discussing this topic disagree with me, and I am not a very fast or enthusiastic writer, I don’t respond to everything individually.
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