There’s this video going around through cell phones, e-mail and the Internet recently. And while a lot of people find it funny, I find it a gross violation of ethics of our medical practitioners right here in Cebu City, as well as a disgusting representation of the behavior of our doctors and nurses.
It is a video of an operating room procedure, wherein the medical staff remove a foreign object lodged in a patient’s colon. It seems a simple, straightforward operation, as the object is removed through the person’s anus. What’s unusual about the operation is that the foreign object happens to be a can of body spray, Avon’s “Black Suede” for men. The product’s name has since lent itself to the video, as people in the medical community now refer to the recording as such.How body spray ended up where the sun doesn’t shine doesn’t matter and is beside the point. What I find especially distasteful is, for one, the behavior of the medical staff in the video. Throughout the entire operation, they laugh and jeer, often interrupting the operation. It was especially distasteful when several of them exclaimed, “baby out!” when the spray can was finally removed. From what I’m told, “baby out” is what medical staff declare when a mother successfully gives birth. On top of the staff’s behavior, what I find a gross violation of medical ethics is how I, a member of the general public, got to see the video in the first place. Why is a video of such a private medical operation circulating in cellular phones and over the Internet? What appalls me even more is that there is not just one version of this video. From what I have seen, there are at least three videos of this same operation going around, indicating that there were at least three cameras recording the event. What were medical staff of this hospital doing taking videos of an operation, then distributing it to the public? Now, before any doctors and nurses blame the student nurses for this, I did take time to ask some respectable medical practitioners and they tell me that no student nurses, not even in the flimsiest of medical schools, are allowed to carry cameras, video or still, into operating arenas. Same goes for camera-equipped cellular phones, or any kind of cellular phone for that matter. Hence, these videos could not have been taken by student nurses. The only people who do have the authority to bring recording devices into operating room are the doctors and nurses. From what sources told me, the hospital did ask the patient’s permission to take the video of such an “unusual case,” and the patient agreed. Be that as it may. But such videos are supposed to be kept in the safekeeping of hospital administrators for archiving purposes. Instead, it’s out playing on cellular phones all around Cebu, perhaps even outside of Cebu. I’m not inclined to believe someone merely slipped and mistakenly allowed this video to escape into the public. And even if the official hospital video is not among those circulating in public, how does the hospital explain three different videos of the same event? Obviously, there was more than one camera in that operating room at the time. All except one were made without the consent of the patient. If the doctors and nurses did not take these videos, they certainly did not try to stop whoever did, since by the look of the videos, there seemed to be no effort on the part of the video-taker to even obfuscate the act of taking the video. How low have some of our medical practitioners sunk to allow such a thing to happen? Do our hospitals hold nothing sacred anymore? Can our hospitals still be trusted? How would I know if the next time I’m given a general anesthetic, some doctor or nurse won’t take a video of me naked and being sliced open without my consent? I suppose I don’t have that assurance anymore. It seems nobody does.
I call on Councilor Christopher Alix, chairman of the Cebu City Council’s committee on health and hospital services, to look into such blatant violation of medical ethics and trampling of plain old human decency. If it happened to someone once, it could happen to another person again. Let’s not wait until it’s someone we know that’s shamed by our medical practitioners like this.
I would be the last person to condone the circulation of such a video. But for the sake of argument and for appropriate action, I encourage concerned readers to go to YouTube.com and enter the search terms “Black Suede.” Apart from copies of Avon’s ads for the product, one of the top results should be the video in question. While the hospital itself is unidentifiable in the video, the faces of the operating room staff are quite clear in some frames and gives a clue as to which hospital this video was taken. My sources point out that these people are practitioners of a government hospital right here in Cebu City. Thankfully, the patient’s identity is hard to determine in these videos, or at least in the videos I’ve seen, but there could very well be more videos of the same operation that I have not seen that do compromise the patient’s identity. I encourage investigators in the medical community to see the video and look at the faces of medical practitioners who would condone such violations of privacy. Let the video they allowed to be taken and be publicized dig their graves for them. |
