MSNBC.com

Italy doctors investigated for needless surgeries

Physicians suspected of doing unnecessary operations to make more
money

The Associated Press
updated 8:06 p.m. CT, Tues., June. 10, 2008

MILAN, Italy - Police have arrested 13 doctors from a clinic in Milan
who investigators suspect performed needless and sometimes fatal
operations to make more money.

Police said Tuesday the charges resulting from the investigation of
Santa Rita Clinic ranged from fraud to homicide.

Three of the doctors were arrested on suspicion of murder for
allegedly having performed on several patients "abnormal or invasive
surgeries, without taking into consideration the fragility of the
patients because of age or their medical condition," the police
statement said.

Police officials said five patients at the clinic are believed to have
died after suspected needless surgeries. A hospital official was also
arrested, police said.

Repeated calls to the clinic Tuesday afternoon went unanswered.

One man who said he was a patient told Italian state TV that he was
given a lung operation instead of thyroid surgery.

"When I awoke, I found these tubes under my armpit," Giovanni
Rizzitano said, pointing to his side as he was interviewed on state TV
Tuesday. "They had operated on my lung."

The head of thoracic surgery was among those reported arrested.

La Repubblica, a Rome daily, quoted Riziero Scocchetti, the 72-year-
old brother of Maria Luisa Scocchetti, who died shortly after lung
surgery in 2006 at Santa Rita. The woman, 65, was dying of breast
cancer in the hospital, the brother was quoted as saying.

"I asked the doctors to let her die in peace," Scocchetti said,
according to the newspaper. "They reassured me that they were doing
everything to save her. Instead they operated on her lung. But
everybody knew she wasn't going to make it."

The newspaper quoted former patient Alfredo Scordo, 76, as saying part
of his lung and some lymph nodes were removed in 2005 while he was
recovering from pneumonia in the hospital.

"They cut open my back, four hours under the knife for a long and
painful surgery," Scordo was quoted as saying.

Police contend that the clinic doctored patients' charts so it could
obtain higher reimbursement for the costlier surgeries from the
Italian national and regional health service in 2005 and 2006, for a
total, police allege, of some US$3.8 million in extra money.

Italian news reports carried what were said to be transcripts of
wiretaps in which doctors sound eager to do expensive surgeries. In
one wiretapped conversation, a doctor reportedly cursed when told that
a 90-year-old patient had been rejected for lung surgery because of
breathing difficulties.

© 2008 The Associated Press

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25085530/

© 2008 MSNBC.com