Florida doctor who didn't wear hearing aids during colonoscopy couldn't hear patient yelling, state health officials say
A hearing-impaired doctor was placed on probation after, Florida health officials said, he began performing a colonoscopy without his hearing aids and did not know the patient was not fully sedated, according to Florida Board of Medicine documents filed this month.
The doctor, Ishwari Prasad, was accused of not immediately stopping the colonoscopy when the patient began yelling during the procedure at a surgery center in Tampa on June 5, 2023, according to an administrative complaint filed by the state Health Department.
In a separate colonoscopy performed the same day, Prasad delegated part of the procedure to a surgical tech who is not a licensed doctor, the complaint alleges.
Prasad uses assistive hearing devices to communicate with his surgical team and was not wearing them during either of the procedures, according to the complaint.
Prasad did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
The complaint, filed in October, accuses Prasad of two counts of medical malpractice. The minimum standard of care requires doctors to immediately stop performing a colonoscopy if a patient is not fully sedated, the document says.
According to a settlement reached this year, Prasad was fined $7,500 and restricted from performing gastroenterology procedures. He neither admitted nor denied the allegations, according to the settlement.
According to Health Department records, Prasad began practicing medicine the early 1980s in New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, specializing in gastroenterology and internal medicine. His license in Florida was issued in 1990, according to the records.
When I was considering a colonoscopy a few years ago I did a ton of research and was interested to learn that the USA is one of the few countries where patients are routinely sedated for the procedure - and it results in a higher number of complications because the patient isn’t able to communicate to the doctor when there is pain which could be resulting from a perforation of the bowel. Most doctors performing the procedure would be able to hear the patient’s complaints unlike this doctor who failed to wear his hearing aids.
I’ve read the horror stories of people whose lives were irrevocably altered and in some cases cut short prematurely by perforated bowel and the nightmare that follows. Yes it is a fairly rare complication, but not worth risking IMHO. Additionally there is always a risk from anesthesia and those risks increase with age so why take the risk when conscious colonoscopy is what 80% of people globally manage to endure?
I ended up choosing cologuard for my first screening because I am low risk and have zero family history of colon cancer, but I have already identified a clinic near me where I can have conscious colonoscopy when the time comes.
