Central New York Injury Lawyer Blog

Sexting during surgery? Ya godda be kidding . . .!

I blogged a few weeks ago about doctors who got into trouble for texting or surfing the web while attending to patients, even during surgery. That was incredible enough, but now a Seattle surgeon has been caught, and suspended, for SEXTING during surgery. The anesthesiologist sent 64 sex-texts during seven surgeries, mostly C-sextions – oops, I meant “sections”.

You might ask yourself, so, what’s the difference between SEXTING and TEXTING? Isn’t the distraction the same? Well, no, in my humble opinion, it’s not. Sexting is even more distracting (not that I would know from personal experience of course) because it involves both brains (guys, you know what I mean). Sexual arousal simply has to count as an additional distraction, above and beyond the mere mental distraction of texting, at least in my book.

Every day I get calls and emails describing awful medical care, which conclude with “will you take my medical malpractice case”? And 90% of the time I politely say “no”. Why?

Justice may be blind, but it’s expensive. That’s particularly true in “med mal” cases. In some cases we have to spend six figures to get the case to a jury. That’s because we have to hire smart experts – doctors – to explain to the jury that the defendant-doctor screwed up, and to prove that the harm he or she caused are no trifling matter. Those smart experts are very expensive.

In many cases the injury is worth less in compensation than the expense of those experts, and the other expenses in the case. If we took on medical malpractice cases with only modest injuries, we would quickly drive our law firm into bankruptcy.

For at least a decade, hospitals and doctors’ offices, hoping improve medical care, have been equipping their offices, operating rooms and staff with nifty computers, ipads, smartphones and other electronic devices. This is great for quickly digging up patient data and drug information. But it also has a dark side.

Doctors and nurses and technicians, just like the rest of us, can get addicted to the “fun” side of these new technologies – social media, texting, tweeting, etc. So addicted, in fact, that they text, tweet, talk and web-surf during important medical procedures.

Apparently, America’s gadget addiction has even penetrated the operating room. For example, more than half of technicians who monitor bypass machines admit they had texted during surgery. Other examples abound. A nurse in an Oregon hospital was caught checking airfares on a computer in the operating room.