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Ohio Plastic Surgeon Loses Medical License After TikTok Livestreams (nytimes.com) 51

Posted by msmash from the bizarre-life-choices dept.
An Ohio plastic surgeon lost her medical license after the state medical board investigated her for livestreaming operations on TikTok and surgical complications reported by patients. From a report: The State Medical Board of Ohio voted at a hearing on Wednesday to permanently revoke Dr. Katharine Roxanne Grawe's medical license and to fine her $4,500 "based on her failure to meet standard of care." At the hearing, doctors on the board said that Dr. Grawe, known online as "Dr. Roxy," had previously been cautioned about protecting patient privacy on social media. They also spoke about her treatment of three unnamed patients who had reported complications from procedures, including one whose surgery Dr. Grawe had broadcast a part of on social media.

Dr. Jonathan B. Feibel, vice president of the medical board, recommended that Dr. Grawe's license be revoked because of the "life altering, reckless treatment" provided to those patients. "These outcomes were not normal complications like those that exist in the routine practice of medicine, but were rather caused by recklessness and disregard for the rules governing the practice of medicine in Ohio," he said.
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Ohio Plastic Surgeon Loses Medical License After TikTok Livestreams More

Ohio Plastic Surgeon Loses Medical License After TikTok Livestreams

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  • Why is this on /. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by r0nc0 ( 566295 )
    I don't get it - is it because they used TikTok? Is that supposed to be "news for nerds"?

  • hi dr nick! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Thursday July 13, 2023 @01:16PM (#63683187)

    hi dr nick!

  • This is a complete non-story. Dumb people do dumb things, sometimes they get fired over it, that's the whole story. It barely deserves two sentences is some hick-town Ohio newspaper, much less anything close to national news. I saw a guy get fired for eating leaded solder paste, that's way more newsworthy than something like this.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kellin ( 28417 )

      I would say he sounds like a guy who wanted to suffer brain damage, but that behavior shows he already had it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 )
        The alleged "logic" was to give himself lead poisoning and sue the company. So yeah, I'd say your assessment is accurate.

    • People are live-streaming surgeries on social media .. you wouldn't want to know that's a thing? I hadn't heard about it. I mean, I knew about surgery videos on YouTube, but not live-streams by a doctor holding up a selfie stick going "watch me cut this open."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 )

        I wouldn't say "People" are doing it. One stupid person was doing it.

        And no, I wouldn't expect to see that on national news.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. The solder paste gyt at least did something excessively stupid with a tech material. Also, apparently TikTok is pretty mich a side issue and medical malpractice resulting in complications that should not have happened is the real reason.

  • 3 patients reported having severe complications (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 13, 2023 @01:46PM (#63683265)

    The State Medical Board of Ohio on Wednesday permanently revoked the medical license of Katharine Roxanne Grawe and fined her $4,500 “based on her failure to meet standard of care,” board spokesperson Jerica Stewart told The Washington Post.

    The board found that while Grawe was performing surgeries, she live-streamed parts of her patients’ procedures on TikTok, spoke into the camera and answered viewer questions from some of her more than 825,000 followers. At least three patients reported having severe complications — infections, a perforated intestine and a loss of brain function — and needing medical care after Grawe operated on them at Roxy Plastic Surgery, her practice in Powell, Ohio, according to the board.

    “The one thing that is clear is that she had an intense focus on her TikTok presence,”

    “Dr. Grawe’s social media was more important to her than the lives of the patients she treated.” A state lawyer arguing for Grawe’s license to be revoked said Grawe “made major surgeries with potentially life-altering complications seem like one big party,”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]

    • Re:3 patients reported having severe complications (Score:5, Informative)

      by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Thursday July 13, 2023 @02:05PM (#63683295)

      A lot people seem to regard plastic surgery as on a level with getting your nails done. It's not. It's unpleasant, it takes considerable time to heal from, and things can go seriously wrong. It's surgery.

      • Look at several actresses that have turned into hideous simulacrums of a human being by botched plastic surgery jobs. I don't know if they tried to get something from an irreparable source after anyone worth a damn said they wouldn't or couldn't do it or what, but when the results are that bad for some of the wealthiest people in the planet that's the universes way of telling you to stay away.

        • Look at several actresses that have turned into hideous simulacrums of a human being by botched plastic surgery jobs.

          It may surprise you to know that some of those aren't botched and was actually the look people were going for. Seriously people do really dumb irreparable shit to their bodies on purpose.

          • ....It may surprise you to know that some of those aren't botched and was actually the look people were going for.....

            I would question the ethics and competence of any doctor who is willing to mutilate a patient because that's "what the customer wants." In some fields, "the customer is always right" shouldn't apply, medicine being one of them.

      • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

        by myowntrueself ( 607117 )

        A lot people seem to regard plastic surgery as on a level with getting your nails done. It's not. It's unpleasant, it takes considerable time to heal from, and things can go seriously wrong. It's surgery.

        She should have gone with 'gender affirming surgery', then she'd be untouchable.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Infection I get, that is always a risk when patient is opened up. But perforated intestine that you don't even notice requires some fucked up level of carelessness as you go around the stomach sucking the fat out. Guess she was too busy making sure it looks good on video to pay attention to the things she was hitting inside the patient.

      • More to the point, perforating intestines requires that you either are operating around a hernia that you didn't know about, or sticking instruments through the abdominal wall. Liposuction occurs outside the abdominal cavity.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          That was my point, yes. These are tissues designed to hold your internal organs in place. They're not fragile and are not something you're going to easily punch through with liposuction tool. That requires pretty epic level of carelessness combined with excessive force.

          Or you didn't actually bother to do prep work on the patient to see if they have hernias, which is just bizarre. I am not an expert on this specific medical procedure, but it sounds absurd to me to surgically go into a patient in a non-emerge

          • getting some imaging

            Every CT scan performed on you increases your risk of cancer. Not a ton. Maybe 1%, tops. But definitely not zero. There are a lot of X-rays going around in one of those. No, for hernias you use those classic, non-ionizing detectors: the eyes and hands. If it's big enough to matter, trust me, you'll notice it.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

              Ever heard of ultrasound?

              And if you're worried about risk of cancer from CT and x-ray when going into invasive surgical procedure into your abdominal cavity, then your risk tolerance is clearly far too low to go into an ELECTIVE invasive surgical procedure into your abdominal cavity. Risks of that are millions of times higher than that of a single CT/x-ray.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by rta ( 559125 )

      It normally takes a LOT to get a medical license outright revoked. And these particular complications seem relatively run of the mill while she seems to run a pretty high volume operation, so it's a small fraction of patients (haven't looked up prevalent rates or her rates etc )

      While i would be happy if TikTok fell into a volcano and we'd never hear of it again, this case seems like pearl clutching by haters on the review board rather than a sober assessment of her skills or risks to patients.

  • "life altering, reckless treatment"
    Do you smell that? It smells like lawsuit in here. When an entire board already finds that to be the result, and you're the patient, you don't even go to court. You just settle. They'd probably have the check in hand same-day.

  • ... they don't have to take down Doctor Pimple Popper's stuff.

    NSFL (Not Safe For Lunchtime)

    • I think that the difference is that the most you get out of her streams, which are done by a different person, is a running commentary. Given that she's talking to the patient as well on what she's doing, she's still keeping her attention where it belongs.

      The argument here is that this surgeon was getting distracted, basically hamming it up for the camera.

      The scale of danger is also different. She's usually just working with surface stuff where the patient is only on a local. I also get the feeling that

      • Dr. Pimple Popper also has her patients agree to be filmed ahead of time and, at least when she was just a YouTube star, charged no professional fee for the work that she was filmed doing. And her commentary doesn't really delay the procedure by very much. It's not much different from how one doctor would describe a procedure to another doctor that wasn't familiar with it, at least in terms of amount of conversation. "So here I'm going to numb around the area [said as she does so], and now I'm making an inc

  • Conflict of Interest (Score:3)

    by pak9rabid ( 1011935 ) on Thursday July 13, 2023 @02:18PM (#63683339)
    Wow, can we say massive conflict of interest? I hope her victims sue the shit out of her..
  • ...There are ways and means of safely communicating medical information, and slapping it on TikTok isn't it. She probably had it coming.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Under current government regulations, there is much much more to patient consent than not giving out names and bluring faces.

        We have to take training on this at the "U" if we do anything adjacent to medical research.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Not entirely correct. People have identifying tattoos, with sufficient resolution, many other parts of the body are identifiable or imaging can be reconstructed. Very specialized surgeries in small locales may fall under statistically identifiable.

            I donâ(TM)t know the specifics of the case, but itâ(TM)s not infeasible that if no release or consent was signed, this doctor violated one or another HIPAA rule.

            Whether the subjects can prove that and want to pursue it, especially since this practice is

  • Any jury deciding that would become "engrossed", demand more videos, and the judge would have to declare a mistrial.

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