Manuceau fights ban

Dr Jerome Manuceau has told Irish Medical Times that he will appeal a move to strike him off the Medical Register to the High Court, in a bid to have the decision reversed.
Dr Manuceau attended the Medical Council hearings on June 4 and July 15 without a solicitor, as he says he did not have sufficient money for one. He continues to work in Paris, where over fifty Irish people have been treated by him in the last six months, he told IMT.

Dr Manuceau had been suspended, following a written complaint by the RCSI, under a Section 51 process. He said the President of the RCSI, Prof Gerald O’Sullivan, claimed gastric bandings are high-risk operations and that it was not appropriate to perform them in cosmetic clinics.
One case cited in evidence against Dr Manuceau involved a man who weighed 20 stone, who had had two kidney transplants. “They considered it was bad practice on my part. But he was killing his kidneys with his obesity. I could not understand it,” said Dr Manuceau.
He said he refused to operate without a letter from the man’s nephrologist ‘asking me to operate’. The gastric band was too small, however. The patient was then taken to hospital, where he was monitored for his kidneys and put on a drip. “He subsequently lost about five stone. I saved this man’s life with the band,” Dr Manuceau claimed.
Another case centred on disputed accounts of a case, where a woman had a lung infection five days after the gastric-banding operation.
“In the hospital, they decided she had a perforation in her oesophagus and that this caused the lung infection. I work in the abdomen: the oesophagus is not an area which I touch. You can have a lung infection without any operation. It was stupid. They operated immediately and removed the gastric band,” he said.
In another case, the clinic sent a woman patient, who had experienced a reflux and an aspiration, on to a hospital. The problem related to the anaesthetic, Dr Manuceau claimed. The patient had to receive antibiotics for some days before leaving hospital.
In another case, the patient had adherences between the fat and the spleen. “When I was cleaning inside, one of the adherences took out a small piece of the capsule of the spleen. In such cases, a swab for coagulation is placed on it and that solved the problem,” he said.