An 84-year-old Florida doctor will have to prove he's still able to practice medicine after he ignored the cries of pain of a severely frozen patient because he wasn't wearing his hearing aids.
“[Il] He did not immediately stop the proceedings when it became clear that [le patient] He wasn't completely drugged. [Le patient] He started screaming that he was in pain and could still feel everything. “Dr. Prasad kept moving the scope,” according to an emergency restraining order issued last September and reported by the Miami Herald.
Last week, gastroenterologist Ishwari Prasad was placed on probation by the Florida Board of Medicine after two incidents last year, according to USA Today.
The octogenarian, who has been licensed since 1990, will have to prove he can still practice medicine after making major errors during two different colonoscopies on June 5, 2023, at Tampa's Ambulatory Surgery Center.
During the first operation, he had in fact “unjustifiably delegated” medical tasks to a surgical technician who was not licensed to practice medicine, US media reported.
The investigation would have revealed that the technician regularly assisted the doctor with certain tasks that were well beyond her training because “Dr. Prasad was unable to perform them himself,” she would have testified.
On the same day, the doctor allegedly began a second procedure even though the patient was not yet properly anesthetized due to an issue with the intravenous line.
However, instead of stopping everything when he heard the screams of pain, the doctor continued his work as if nothing had happened, until the hospital director came to stop him.
According to the complaint, the 80-year-old was not wearing his hearing aids at the time of the accident, so he could not have heard his patient's distress on the operating table.
In addition to being placed on probation while awaiting re-evaluation by another doctor over ten procedures, the doctor would have received a $7,500 fine and would have to pay an additional $6,301 to cover costs related to his case.
