DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog

In 2008 alone, more than a million Americans underwent various coronary procedures, including balloon angioplasty and coronary artery bypass surgery. However, while these expensive measures can be lifesaving for some, they do not necessarily do a better job at protecting most people’s hearts than a heart-healthy lifestyle would, Jane Brody writes in the New York Times. Essentially, the surgeries are like “‘doing cosmetic surgery on coronary arteries, making them look pretty, but it’s not treating the underlying biology of these arteries,’” Brody quotes the Miami cardiologist and author, Dr. Michael Ozner.

Dr. Ozner is an advocate of preventive coronary care, which he believes is safer, less costly, and more effective than intervention. Interventional cardiology that involves invasive coronary procedures has become lucrative for hospitals and doctors, costing $60 billion a year in the U.S. But such procedures have not been proven to “prevent heart attacks or coronary mortality in most patients.” Worse, they may even be harmful; Brody quotes a 2006 report revealing that the stents inserted in angioplasty can elevate the chance that “a dangerous clot will form in a coronary artery.”

So how do patients find out whether they are candidates for invasive coronary procedures? Dr. Ozner, who authored “The Great American Heart Hoax,” urges patients to seek an independent second opinion if their doctors recommend surgery to them. He said that “unstable patients” who have symptoms that really warrant surgical interventions are those who are in the middle of a heart attack or those with severe chest pain from minimal exertion. If you do not experience any chest pains or cardiac symptoms, you likely do not need surgery on your heart.

Brody writes in the second of her two columns on coronary care about the alternative treatments of the heart. Many of these preventive measures have been well-established and are widely known: selecting foods that are found in the Mediterranean diet (rich in fish oil, nuts, seeds, vegetables and fruits), maintaining good dental hygiene (gum diseases are linked to chronic inflammation), reducing chronic stress (with adequate sleep and regular relaxation activities), and exercising regularly (only 15 minutes of exercise a day for five days a week can make a lot of difference).

People who follow these tips can reduce their risks for heart problems by up to 50%, while avoiding the costly and risky surgeries that have yet to be proven to prevent coronary deaths.

An international research team has shown that death and complication rates from surgery can be dramatically improved by using simple checklists to make sure that safety measures are taken before, during and after each operation.

The research project, involving nearly 8,000 patients at eight hospitals around the world, was done as part of the World Health Organization's program called Safe Surgery Saves Lives. The results were published in January 2009 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

When the surgical teams at the hospitals used the checklists, they found that death rates were cut in half and non-fatal complications by one-third.

The nineteen items on the surgical safety checklist include basic items like verifying that the team has the correct patient and the correct surgical site, making sure the pulse oximeter (which measures oxygen in the blood) is working, making sure antibiotics have been given within one hour before the start of the surgery to prevent infection, and confirming that x-rays needed for the case are on display in the operating room. One other item on the checklist is to have all members of the surgical team introduce themselves by name and role; this is intended to give permission to lower-status team members to speak up at a later time if they notice something wrong. Click here for the entire checklist from the WHO (which is part of the United Nations).

The Patrick Malone law firm has prosecuted many lawsuits against hospitals where these basic preventive steps were not done and their absence led to tragedy. Examples include non-functioning pulse oximeters, surgery done on the wrong body part, and failing to prepare for known possible risks like heavy bleeding.

Patrick Malone discusses steps that patients can take to make sure their surgeons follow safe practices in his new book, The Life You Save: Nine Steps to Finding the Best Medical Care -- and Avoiding the Worst, available at Amazon.

When a doctor knows that his patient would receive better care elsewhere, should he inform the patient and send him to another provider? While this question is yet to be settled among bioethicists and physicians themselves, authors of an article published recently in the journal, Public Library of Science Medicine, think doctors have an ethical obligation to tell patients that better care is available to them, according to the New York Times’ Denise Grady.

Research has shown that facilities that perform high volumes of a certain procedure do it better than those that perform the procedure less frequently. The difference is substantial, especially in surgeries of pancreatic and esophageal cancer, although “the experience of the surgeon and the whole medical team [is] important in any major cancer surgery.”

Only a few courts around the country have decided whether doctors have a legal duty to inform patients that another doctor might have more skill and experience performing a planned surgery. One of them is Maryland's highest court, the Court of Appeals, thanks to a client of Patrick Malone named Billy Boone who suffered brain damage after an ear surgeon punched a hole into Mr. Boone's brain.

Mr. Boone's case shows that surgeons' skills make a difference in much more than cancer surgeries. The Maryland Court of Appeals decided that Boone had a legal right to know that his surgeon did not have extensive experience doing the ear surgery that Mr. Boone underwent.

Mr. Boone had an outpatient surgery in January 2000, to remove a benign growth from the mastoid cavity behind his left ear. Dr. Seth Goldberg, an ear nose throat surgeon, performed this surgery, called a mastoidectomy. Seventeen years before, Mr. Boone underwent the same procedure, in which another surgeon drilled out the same mastoid to remove a cheesy growth of skin debris called a cholesteatoma. Unknown to Boone, the surgeon had become lost at one point during the procedure and drilled a hole in the skull just above the mastoid, near the bottom of the brain's temporal lobe. But nothing happened to his brain, which was protected by the tough fibrous shell below the skull called the dura. Years later, when Dr. Goldberg prepared for the new surgery, he took some CT scan pictures of the bone anatomy and saw the pencil-sized hole in the side of the skull.

Dr. Goldberg's surgery seemed uneventful, but after Boone went home, he developed a short-term memory problem that ruined his ability to do carpentry; worse, he developed a problem controlling his temper that unleashed itself at stressful moments on whoever happened to be nearby. Later, his neurologist explained to the jury that Boone's outbursts could be traced to injury in the limbic system that modulates emotional response.

A CT scan showed that a hole had been poked from the pre-existing skull defect into Boone's brain. A small pocket of air could be seen in the temporal lobe, surrounded by a pool of blood. But it wasn't just air in the brain – it was something slightly denser than air, likely surgical gelfoam which could have made its way there only if Dr. Goldberg had pushed it in to try to stop bleeding after he punched the first hole.

The key moment for Mr. Boone came not in the surgery but a month before, when he sat down with Dr. Goldberg to go over the planned operation. Goldberg never volunteered the key information: that with the hole in the skull from the prior surgery, his surgery would be that much more difficult, could even result in an injury to the brain, and Mr. Boone might benefit from consulting with someone who regularly did "revision mastoidectomies," the technical term for this second go-round. A general ENT doctor who advertised his specialty in facial cosmetic work like nose jobs – he named his professional corporation the "Aesthetic Facial Surgery Center of Rockville" – Goldberg only had done occasional revision mastoid surgeries. His operation on Boone proved he wasn't up to the job. On the witness stand, Goldberg admitted he hadn't discussed with Boone the hole in the skull, the chance of brain damage, or the availability of sub-specialists called neurotologists. For Billy Boone, the jury's vote in his favor, and the Court of Appeals' affirmance of the award, gave him some vindication. For other patients, his win makes it easier to demand the information you need to make a sensible selection among surgeons. Of course, if you asked Billy Boone, he would trade in legal vindication for a healthy brain any day. It's too late for him, but not for the rest of us.

(Click here for more information on the Boone case, and follow this link to Mr. Patrick Malone's closing argument.)