Troubling questions on Neary’s motives

The Minister for Health, Mary Harney, has been asked to include another 40 former patients of former obstetrician Dr Michael Neary in the redress scheme set up to compensate the women who suffered under his care.
Two UK-based consultant obstetricians, at the request of the lobby group Patient Focus, have reviewed another 62 case files belonging to some of Dr Neary’s former patients who were not included in the original Lourdes Hospital Inquiry review, which focused on hysterectomies.

Thirty nine of these women, according to Dr Roger Clements and Dr Richard Porter, have valid cases for compensation.Patient Focus have been contacted by about 130 former patients of Dr Neary who have concerns regarding their care, most of which involved general gynaecological procedures.
The report by the UK doctors states that the most common unnecessary procedure in the 62 files they reviewed was bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (BSO). “In some cases this operation can be clinically indicated, but when it is not it unnecessarily removes physiologically desirable sex hormones — castration in other words,” states the report.
“Many women were coerced into having their ovaries, and sometimes their uterus, removed on the basis they had endometriosis… This diagnosis was almost always made on clinical examination alone…This is in fact rarely possible.”
The doctors also state the women were repeatedly told by Dr Neary, post-operatively, that he had saved their lives. “In our opinion it is only in the most extreme circumstances, even when true, appropriate for a doctor to tell a patient that he has saved their life,” states the report. “In these cases it was, in any event, never true.”
The doctors also state that the explanation in the Lourdes Hospital Inquiry report that Dr Neary performed numerous unnecessary hysterectomies due to a fear of blood loss cannot be used in these cases.
“We believe that a fear of excessive blood loss cannot possibly explain his cavalier treatment of women’s reproductive organs,” state the doctors. “In our view the recurrent nature of this behaviour, and the absence of evidence of inadequate surgical technique, raises very troubling questions about his motives.”