Doctor Where?
Patients pound bait & switch big-$$ surgeon with lawsuits
One of New York City’s highest paid surgeons — who made $7.3 million last year — was a virtual ghost in the operating room, leaving more than 1,000 patients in the hands of unsupervised residents for delicate prostate procedures and other surgeries, according to two new lawsuits.
Dr. David Samadi would claim to be performing the surgeries but was actually in another operating room at Lenox Hill Hospital, according to the lawsuits filed Friday in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Samadi, the head of urology at Lenox Hill, went so far as to put the patients under general anesthesia rather than a milder sedative so they would not realize he wasn’t in the operating room, the suits charge.
“He was not there. He was not in the room,” former patient Peter Nadler told The Post. Nadler said he chose the self-promoting Samadi to address his problem of frequent urination thinking the surgeon was “a miracle worker.”
But the 68-year-old Upper East Side resident said the problem got worse after the 2015 surgery and he now also suffers from erectile dysfunction.
Nadler contends the procedure was done by an unsupervised resident as Samadi operated on someone else, according to his lawsuit, which alleges fraud and malpractice and was filed against Samadi, Lenox Hill and parent company Northwell Health.
“We feel it was a sham,” said Lorraine Waters, Nadler’s wife.
George Markelson, whose late father, Stephen Markelson, was supposed to haveve surgery with Samadi, says inn a separate suit that the 201313 operation was instead done by an unsupervised resident.
The suit allegeses the oper-operation resulted inin a hemor-hemorrhage several daysays later and a second surgeryrgery to have his entiretire prostate re-removed.
Samadi saidd he had not seen the lawsuits but disputed al-legations thatt he was an ab-bsentee surgeon.n
“Every criticalal part of the casease and every impor-ortant part of thethe case is done byy me,” he told The Post. “The residents,ents, they don’t perform anything on their own in a vacuum.” The lawsuits, which each seek $7 million, are the latest trouble for Samadi and Lenox Hill. The US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan is probing Samadi’s billing practices, according to an October e-mail sent by prosecutors to The Boston Globe. The state Deppartment of Health is also investigating gating the doctor, a according to the Globe, whicwhich in March first reported on Samadi’s allegedleged double bobooking. Overlapping surgeries are permitted, but Medicarecare rules forbidforb teaching hospita-lshospita from doinging concurrent surgeriessur when the “critical pparts” of two ooperations hhappen at tthe same titime. Samadi, 50, whwho specializeizes in using a susurgical robot to remove ddiseased prprostates, camcame to Lenox HilHill in July 2012013.
His contract includes incentive clauses related to how many operations he performs, the suits allege.
An analysis of hospital schedules from the day Samadi arrived through Aug. 31, 2016, shows he did 2,182 urologic surgeries and that 70 percent of them overlapped to some degree, according to legal papers.
On one day, March 5, 2014, 11 of Samadi’s patients underwent surgery and all but one of the operations overlapped, court papers show.
Samadi would sometimes leave a robotic surgery momentarily — and leave instruments inside a patient — to do a mandated pre-surgical overview of a procedure in another room, the court papers say.
An investigation by lawyer Joseph Lanni, who represents Nadler and Markelson, showed that double-booking urologic surgeries was banned from at least 1983 until Samadi arrived, legal papers show.
The Post has also reported that Samadi has claimed to be a professor at the Hofstra/Northwell School of Medicine although he is not.
A Northwell Health spokesman declined to comment.