Blaming the Victim
Sometimes I am dumbfounded by the reaction some people have to an event compared to the event itself.
A case in point was the public reaction to a recent jury verdict out of Virginia Beach. The jury believed that a locally well-known plastic surgeon, Dr. Matthew Galumbeck, who appears regularly on local TV, discharged Maritess Lopez, a 36-year old mother of four, an hour after cosmetic surgery despite her reporting difficulty breathing.
She was dead by the next evening and an autopsy showed that her death was caused by aspiration pneumonia, i.e., pneumonia that results from inhaling stomach contents. There was testimony that Dr. Galumbeck’s office was notified about Ms. Lopez’s breathing problems but never followed up. The jury awarded $1.95 million.
A comment to the newspaper article, in the Virginian Pilot, expressed a popular sentiment: “The clear fact is, if she had not chosen to risk her life having the ‘Mommy Makeover’ her four children would still have their ‘Mommy;’ regardless of the care she did or did not receive. Anyone who chooses to go through that much surgery must have known the risk and the worse risk being the end result, death.”
It is true that Maritess did have a lot of surgery at one sitting: a breast lift and augmentation, liposuction, and a tummy tuck. The problem is that few plastic surgeons make much effort to explain the risk of piggybacking multiple surgeries. After all, the surgeon has a financial disincentive because whether he does three separate procedures or does them all at once, his fee is still the same.
Worse, the patient gets charged three outpatient charges and three anesthesia charges, when the procedures are split up. So imagine a plastic surgeon saying: “We could do it all at one time. My fee is $3,500 and the hospital and anesthesiologist will charge you another $6,000. I recommend, however, that you split it up into three separate surgeries, which would be a lot safer, but then you would have to pay another $18,000 to those others and come back two more times. So I’ll leave it up to you.”
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