A hearing-impaired doctor was placed on probation after Florida health officials said he began performing a colonoscopy without his hearing aids and did not know the patient was not fully sedated, according to Florida Board of Medicine documents filed earlier this month.
The doctor, Ishwari Prasad, was accused of failing to immediately stop the colonoscopy when the patient began screaming during the procedure at a Tampa surgery center on June 5, 2023, according to an administrative complaint filed by the state Department of Health.
In a separate colonoscopy performed the same day, Prasad allegedly delegated part of the procedure to a surgical technician who is not a licensed physician, according to the complaint.
Prasad uses hearing aids to communicate with his surgical team and was not wearing them during any of the procedures, according to the complaint.
Prasad did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
The complaint, filed last October, accuses Prasad of two counts of medical malpractice. The minimum standard of care requires doctors to immediately stop performing a colonoscopy if a patient is not fully sedated, the document says.
Under a settlement reached earlier this year, Prasad was fined $7,500 and banned from performing gastroenterology procedures. He neither admitted nor denied the allegations, according to the settlement.
According to State Department of Health Records, Prasad began practicing medicine in the early 1980s in New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, specializing in gastroenterology and internal medicine. His Florida license was issued in 1990, records show.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com