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O U T P A T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E | M A R C H 2 0 1 5
Deadly Case of Distracted Doctoring
Don't let technology come between you and your patients.
T
he cell phone he carried into the oral sur-
gery suite turned out be a smoking gun.
Anesthesiologist Barry Friedberg, MD,
claims he made a 30-second call to check his voice-
mail, never once leaving the patient's side — "My
left hip was in constant contact with her left hip,"
he says — and maintaining constant visual contact
with her chest excursions and constant auditory contact with the
pulse oximeter. A technician from the procedure tells quite a different
story. She testified that Dr. Friedberg refused to end his call when she
tried to warn him of a problem with the patient.
It really doesn't matter if Dr. Friedberg made a 30-second call by the
patient's bedside or was on a 30-minute call out in the hallway. Or that
he never stopped watching her chest excursions or listening to the
pulse oximeter.
The headline in the Orange County Register late last month says it
all: "DOCTOR ACCUSED OF TALKING ON CELL DURING SURGERY GETS PROBA-
TION."
All people will remember about the case more than 5 years ago at
the now-closed Smile Implant Center in Newport Beach, Calif., was
that the patient suffered a heart attack and died during an operation to
replace her dental implants, and that the anesthesiologist responsible
for keeping her alive held his cell phone to his ear during the surgery.
End of story.
There's more to the story, of course. There always is. "Google air
embolus dental death," says Dr. Friedberg. "The case involved 7 open
mandibular sockets."
But with distracted doctoring as much of a societal scourge as tex-
E D I T O R ' S P A G E
Dan O'Connor
