A grieving widower is suing a medical manufacturer, claiming that its device burned a hole in his wife’s organs during a procedure to treat her colon cancer, eventually leading to her death.
Harvey Sultzer, husband of the late Sandra Sultzer, filed a lawsuit on Feb. 6 against Intuitive Surgical (IS) claiming his wife suffered health complications following a procedure completed by their surgical robot.
Sandra underwent an operation at Baptist Health Boca Raton Regional Hospital in September 2021 to treat her colon cancer using the da Vinci robot, a multi-armed, remote-controlled device, according to the lawsuit.
The device is advertised “to enable precision beyond the limits of the human hand,” being “designed to provide surgeons with natural dexterity while operating through small incisions,” allowing for minimally invasive procedures.
The lawsuit claims that the device burned a hole in her small intestine, which required Sandra to undergo additional medical interventions.
After the procedures, Sandra continued to suffer abdominal pain and had a fever until she died in February 2022 as “a direct and proximate result of the injuries she suffered,” the lawsuit claims. --->READ MORE HERE
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| AFP via Getty Images |
A surgical robot burned a hole in a Florida woman’s small intestine during surgery and lead to a deadly internal leak, a lawsuit filed by her husband claims.
Sandra Sultzer, 78, from Boca Raton, died in 2022 following a procedure to treat her colon cancer the previous year, which was performed using a 'da Vinci' robot.
The four-armed machine is activated by a doctor who operates a camera and a surgeon who manipulates the robot’s arms from a console using a joystick and foot pedals.
But the lawsuit alleges that a fault allowed stray electrical energy emanating from the robotic arms used to cut body tissue and burn her internal organs without the surgical team’s knowledge.
The lawsuit added that this is not the first time that da Vinci robots have caused undue harm, saying that the company behind the device, Intuitive Surgical Inc., ‘has also received thousands of injury and defect reports’.
Sandra Sultzer went into surgery at Baptist Health Boca Raton Regional Hospital in September 2021 to treat her colon cancer.
Surgeons there were using the da Vinci surgical robot, a freestanding cart equipped with four arms.
One arm holds a camera, or laparoscope, and the surgeon operates the other three ‘hands’ by putting their fingers into small sets of loops behind a console.
Each arm is outfitted with forceps, scissors, scalpels and other surgical tools, and can cut incisions about the size of a dime.
The precise movements typically result in less blood loss and trauma to the surgical site than would an open surgery with a larger cut.
The arms are wrapped with little rubber sleeves to prevent electricity from leaking to areas of the body outside of the very precise surgical site, but the lawsuit alleges that the sleeves had cracks in them that allowed electrical currents to escape.
This, the lawsuit alleges, is what caused a hole to be burned into Mrs Sultzer’s small intestine.
The burn as a result of electricity radiating out, known as arcing, happened outside of the doctor’s field of vision, so it went unnoticed. --->READ MORE HERE
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