‘Troubled’ patient convinced he was on way to getting cancer, says surgeon
ABREAST surgeon accused of carrying out unnecessary operations has described one patient in court as a “quivering mass of anxiety” who believed getting cancer was inevitable.
Ian Paterson said the “troubled” man came to his consultation already convinced “he was on the way to getting breast cancer” and that nothing the surgeon told him would have changed his mind.
Health worker John Ingram had what prosecutors allege was a needless double mastectomy, after claiming Paterson told him he was “on the road to developing breast cancer”.
Paterson is standing trial after denying 20 counts of wounding with intent against nine women and one man relating to procedures he carried out between 1997 and 2011.
The surgeon, of Castle Mill Lane, Ashley, Altrincham, Greater Manchester, was formerly employed by Heart of England NHS Trust and also practised at Spire Healthcare.
But Paterson, 59, told Nottingham Crown Court that Mr Ingram’s memory had become “confused” over time.
He said: “Mr Ingram had it in his head he was going to get breast cancer whatever I said to him.
“He was, unfortunately, a troubled gentleman with multiple phobias – one of them breast cancer, because his mother had died of breast cancer, aged 42.
“So the minute he had an abnormality in his chest wall, in his head he was on the way to getting breast cancer.
“Very little I told him thereafter would disavow him of that view.”
Paterson added: “This quivering mass of anxiety; about cancer, about his mother, about having a general anaesthetic at hospital.
“We’ve already seen his reaction to a biopsy – he was hiding behind a chair.”
Jurors have previously heard claims Paterson carried out completely unnecessary operations for “obscure motives” which may have included a desire to “earn extra money”.
Mr Ingram, then 42, gave evidence that, after a consultation with Pater- son about a lump in his breast in May 2006, he was told a tissue sample showed “pre-cancer”.
He claimed to have been taken in by Paterson “hook, line and sinker”.
Paterson was asked by Julian Christopher QC, prosecuting, about Mr Ingram’s test report, which only showed potentially abnormal cells in his breast tissue.
Mr Christopher asked the surgeon: “Are we agreed that on the basis of this report it would be quite wrong to tell Mr Ingram he would inevitably travel in time towards cancer?”
Paterson said: “I don’t think in this letter (to Mr Ingram’s GP) I say he was inevitably going to travel towards cancer and this is my contemporaneous record.
“Regardless of what I said, I think he thought he would inevitably get breast cancer.”
He added: “I doubt I said that, simply because nobody has a crystal ball.
“I can’t tell anybody they will inevitably get cancer.
“Mr Ingram in consultation – it was very difficult to know if he was in the consultation, he was so agitated and anxious, and he presented himself very well in the witness box.
“But that is not the person he was in the consultation room in the hospital.”
Paterson described Mr Ingram’s claim he had been walking around with the patient’s breast tissue slides in his pocket during a medical conference in Edinburgh as “ridiculous”.
Proceeding