The Shariah Medical Commission has acquitted a British surgeon at a private hospital in Jeddah on charges of committing a medical error that left a woman a quadriplegic two years ago. The commission received two conflicting medical reports on the case from two independent medical teams set up to determine responsibility for the paralysis. The commission's decision to dismiss the case against doctor has caused a great deal of anger in the victim's family. The Jordanian woman went to the hospital with an optic nerve problem in her left eye and was told to undergo “urgent surgery” to remove what was described as “optic nerve trauma”. She was then pregnant in her eighth month. During the surgery, the woman went into coma due to a shortage of blood supply to the brain. The family accused the surgeon of cutting some nerves which led the woman to go into coma. The woman delivered her baby while she was in coma. The Shariah Medical Commission tasked two medical teams to investigate the case. One team, led by the head consultant of the Neurosurgery Department at King Khaled National Guard Hospital in Jeddah, said that the complications were unexpected and were not caused by a medical error. The second team, led by neurosurgeons from King Fahd General Hospital in Jeddah, said that the doctor was responsible for the complications, providing evidence of conflicting responses from the doctor about the scan images in two different reports he wrote about the case. The report presented by the second team said that the patient was put into the intensive care unit only after 11 days of the surgery which caused blood clots in the brain and gas bubbles in the blood, which would support the evidence of cut veins and nerves. The report cited a lack of coordination before the surgery between the eye surgeon and the gynecologist. “This only happened after the surgery,” the report said. The husband of the paralyzed woman declined to comment.
