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Dr. James BurtThe Love SurgeonHe is an example of the way miscreants and incompetents can thrive in medicine, decade after decade, not only without being caught, but with the automatic and unquestioning support and protection of other healthcare professionals. Actually, if you are in the right kind of hospital, that support and protection comes from factions beyond healthcare. Patients, for all practical purposes, are powerless to respond even to violent crime or its equivalent in medicine. For 22 years in southwestern Ohio, Dr. James Burt, a gynecologist, not a licensed surgeon*, subjected thousands of women to bizarre, disfiguring operations involving clitoral circumcision and vaginal reshaping, which he called the Surgery of Love, sometimes performing the operation without their permission when they had been anesthetized for something else. He admitted in a book that he did it without their permission and yet was allowed to keep doing it for another 14 years after that admission. Many of his patients never could have sex again. Marriages fell apart. Lives were ruined. Complaints were unheard. And year after year Dr. Burt continued to perform operations. Plastic Surgical Postero-Lateral Refirection Extension Vulvo-VaginoplastyNot only did he, and everyone else, ignore the complaints, but he wrote a paper in which he said that not only were there almost no problems resulting from his procedure, but that this operation was so successful that prior to it 17.1% of his patients reported wife beating, but after it 0.0% reported wife beating. According to a paper he co-wrote with Arthur R. Schramm (who was not found guilty for another twenty years), the way he cut up women's vaginas stopped their husbands from beating them (click Vaginoplasty to see the paper on which I have highlighted some key sentences if you want to see for yourself). Some of his victims found each other and collectively tried to get help from the police and the local prosecutor (but, of course, in medicine there are no witnesses - see survey) and anyone else who would listen, including the hospital and other doctors. When they got nowhere, they turned to the news media. When the local newspaper ignored them, they went to network television. A report on CBS broke the case open. Shortly after the network news coverage the Ohio State Medical Board took action, apparently in response to CBS's investigation, not their own. This is typical of state medical boards. Almost no complaints filed by patients result in anything other than the dismissal of cases for lack of evidence. How thorough can the investigations have been if they didn't even discover that the person performing the surgeries didn't even have a license? How much much better evidence of wrong-doing could there be than an admission by the person himself, in print in a book written by himself, that he performs the operations without the permission of the patients? That deserves repeating. Without the permission of the patients. That alone should have resulted in the suspension of his license, if he had had a license. Statute of LimitationsAs a result of the news coverage, many others of his victims finally realized that all of the doctors who had been ignoring them or brushing them off (which is normal, see white wall all of silence) were not the last word. A superior court decided that the statute of limitations would start with the news broadcast, rather than at the time of the medical procedures, and patients who had been damaged years in the past were able to file suits. As with people who had been abused by priests when children, statutes of limitations are not written in stone. One nurse who had helped with Burt's surgeries commented later that nurses do not see how much pain patients are in afterwards. They don't know there is anything to report. They forget about anything untoward they might have seen and move on to the next patient. She said she was dazzled by him and really didn't understand what he was doing. However, other nurses tell a different story. Criminal InvestigationA police officer who worked on the case said that the break for law enforcement came when a nurse retired and finally confessed. It was learned that Burt chose victims who were weak and would be unlikely to retaliate. The socially connected wives of bank presidents were safe. But one time he made a mistake and operated on a woman who was rich enough to keep a private investigator on the case for as long as necessary to get justice. The break came when that one nurse retired. The private investigator was able to persuade her that now that she was retired, her career could not be effected by speaking. So she finally spoke. In other words, she and other nurses allowed this to go on for decades in order to preserve their careers. Wouldn't it be nice if any of the thoughts or routines of nursing changed as a result of cases like this? Unfortunately, this continues to be an accurate portrayal of how nurses protect patients when patients have problems. In a Nov 6, 1988 article in the Dayton Daily News, one patient said that Burt told her not to allow any other physician to do a pelvic examine. He said they would not know what he’d done and they would cause her to bleed internally and she would bleed to death in the car on the way home. She believed him. He operated on her 18 times to try to repair the damage he had done. A December 1, 1988 article in the Dayton Daily News said that in 12 years Dr. Burt had been sued 10 times for the surgery. According to another article Burt had no insurance and his assets were in his wife’s name so all the suits were dropped. He has since moved to Florida. Hit your back button to return to where you were
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