Ghost Surgery the Routine Practice

Ghost Surgery

The routine practice of "ghost surgery" is well documented in medicine. Ghost surgery refers to any medical procedure in which the contracting physician was not the actual physician who performed the procedure. In many instances, the patient is completely unaware simply because the patient is unconscious at the time. Ghost surgery is not, strictly speaking, limited to surgical procedures. The same phenomenon occurs in a variety of medical settings from radiology to routine lab work. In some instances, ghost surgery is a necessary component of the medical system, for example with the obvious need to train medical students to become the future surgeons of the world. However, this is wrong when the patient is unaware of what is going on even if he or she signed a release form that releases liability from the hospital and the physicians. From there, the patient has a right to know what is happening to them by knowing who is performing the surgery or procedure before signing the release form.

In the 1963 case, (Quinbee, 1963), Tunkl signed the release form when he was in pain and sedated, leaving him unaware of what he was signing. During his recovery at the medical center, he sustained injuries due to the neglect of two physicians, however the court took the favor of Regents of the University of California. This was because Tunkl signed a valid release even though he was sedated.

(Tunkl v. Regents of the University of California).

However, when under sedation and in great pain, the patient is not aware or focus on what they are doing. The medical center should have let him sign the release form before they sedated him so that he would have been fully aware of what was going on with his body and the consequences of signing the form. It is the same as the patient not knowing that they had a ghost surgery conducted on them. The patient has the right to know that someone else will be performing the surgery in case they want to decline from having the surgery. The patient may not want a student to be cutting on them. Furthermore, it is wrong for the patient not to know everything before signing the release, which includes the procedures of ghost surgery.