Usually we have reasons for being rude round here! They may be weird, but there’s reasons!! LOL ;p
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I’m guessing in Norway they just drink a gallon of strong coffee to get things cleaned out first too.
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I don’t know if it’s normal or not, but that’s my plan!
(For the few I’ve heard about, they all involved general anesthesia.)
It’s been partially explained already, but here’s just a little more explanation: My wife had a colonoscopy a few years ago (she has a strong family history of cancers in that area), and the anaesthetic they give you can cause amnesia for a period after you come out. In fact, the instructions my wife got said something along the lines of “don’t get yourself into a situation where you need to sign any legally binding contracts, as chances are good you won’t remember them”. Or something along those lines. And I can vouch for the fact that there were definitely some amnesiac effects for the 12 hours or so after she got it done… She was repeating herself quite a bit, and any instructions her doctor gave her afterwards would have quickly been forgotten if they weren’t written down (although frankly, any doctor administering/supervising a colonoscopy would know that, and should be giving the instructions in written form any way).
With my wife’s procedure (here in Canada), they described the anaesthetic as a ““conscious sedation” - where she can respond to instructions, but is still sedated for all intents and purposes (and she remembers none of the procedure at all).
As to this case… I was surprised to see a defmation judgment there. Apparently my understanding of defamation law was way off.
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I think it’s also not entirely the same situation. A person is far more vulnerable in that situation and is placing a certain amount of trust in their doctor/medical professionals not to take advantage of that vulnerability.
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My dad has had a few colonoscopies and they were all awake. I probably would do one awake too, but not without some xanax or valium. Something to keep me nice and relaxed and not too worried about what’s going on back there. I had a toenail removed with just local anesthesia and it was pretty uncomfortable, but it didn’t hurt. Just a lot of pressure that felt really gross.
I think a lot of stuff is done under general anesthesia that would be a lot less risky to do with local plus an anxiolytic drug so the docs don’t have to deal with a stressed out patient.
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Ouch! 
Then again, I work in a healthcare system with physician only anaesthesia, providing a 1:1 service with no nurses to take over. We work hard in a public healthcare system and our productivity enables or supports about 70% of hospital clinical activity in some way or other. Pretty sure I earn my $$ .
When I heard the story I did think it was rather rude to leave the recording device on … That was outweighed by the dreadful lack of professionalism shown by the medical team that was obvious when I saw the transcript. Quietly bemoaning patient choices that make a procedure technically awkward is fair, but outright insulting is not.
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Well, without anesthesia, there are an awful lot of procedures that could not be done at all.
Depends on what counts as anesthesia. Go back far enough and there were plenty of procedures done haphazardly
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To be fair, there is usually at least one asshole on display during any colonoscopy.
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My understanding was that anaesthesiologists (piss off Firefox, that IS how you spell it) basically are keeping the patient alive, yet drugging them with the kind of stuff that’ll kill them stone dead if you’re not careful, and it’s really fucking hard?
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The fact that some states are two-party consent one annoys me very much. What is the reasoning behind this?
Some states are two party consent because propofol and other general anesthetics can cause severe memory loss. I don’t remember anything within about a 24 hour range of my last general anesthetic procedure.
Making jokes or venting out is something I would accept from the doctors. But they definitely crossed the line with the fake diagnosis.
By the way: is it a one-party consent if you are actually sedated and the doctors had a reasonable expectation of “privacy” since the patient wasn’t really there? I’d say, bad lawyers here…
Meaning: the patient actually recorded a third party conversation where he was not present. That’s wire tapping! 
(edited with the “meaning”)
This, when I had a camera go down my throat I remember nothing after the Valium went in my arm, just some going fuzzy then all of a sudden being in the recovery room and having my shirt and jacket back on again feeling confused as to how I got them on. The nurse said I had done that, so yeah walking about doing things with no recall of it. I kinda sorta remember walking to the car with my dad, then being home and thinking yeah a nap would be good.
I wonder if he’d been to that place before and had been lied to before by the staff telling him he’d already talked to the doctor and just didn’t remember (“Shah reportedly told an assistant to convince the man that he had spoken with Shah and “you just don’t remember it.””) and since he’d “forgotten” instructions before, he thought he needed to do something to capture it.
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I’ve got family that worked many years in the operating room and a mainstay of their stories were the jokes told (by doctors/nurses) at the patient’s expense (figuratively and literally, I suppose).
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Personally, I like to think that I have a thick enough skin to deal with the kind of jokes and insults in the article. But I have no stomach at all for fraud. Doubly so for medical fraud.
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I suspect that its size largely reflects the jury’s strong impression that the medical team are terrible, terrible people who must be punished; but the defamation judgement was probably a result of the fact that, apparently, one of the types of claims that Virginia law treats as defamatory per se (rather than requiring any demonstration of harm resulting from the defamatory statement) is the claim that someone is carrying an infectious disease.
That would make the ‘Lol, is it syphilis or dick-tuberculosis? Haha’ merry banter much, much, easier to hang a defamation claim on.
If the case were purely about that, I’d have some doubt about its ability to survive on appeal, the US isn’t a friendly venue for defamation cases and while Virginia’s law hasn’t been struck down on constitutional grounds, somebody with a taste for the application of the first amendment might well make some applications of it impossible.
As it is, though, the case is so much about the fact that the medical team are terrible human beings who nobody would possibly want practicing medicine on them, and no medical establishment would want to admit to having hired; that they would probably prefer that the case just sink into history as fast as possible. Even if they managed to break even on lawyers by getting the 100k back, this publicity is not good publicity.
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It seems like the general anesthetic is pretty common practice here in Canada, one of my nurse friends mentioned someone did come to in the middle of the procedure and it was quite uncomfortable.
By the way, no food or drink, at least 24 hours before and before that you take a purgative which purges your system so you need to be near a bathroom for some time. Also two days before - no solids (except jello).
This topic reminded me of having my tonsils out (back in the mid-70s as a teenager) and as I was going under anesthetic, I could overhear the doctor and the anesthetist (edit) telling the young nurse that she would need to give each of them a kiss before they started and she did. Hopefully times have changed.
