At Large
An offensive video
By Rina Jimenez-David
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:01:00 04/18/2008
MANILA, Philippines—ABS-CBN Broadcasting has been going to town with a story about a video taken by someone inside an operating room of the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center in Cebu. The operation involved the removal of a canister shoved inside the rectum of a man, which is a simple enough procedure, but while the operation was taking place, doctors and nurses could be heard giggling, sniggering, laughing and even cheering. And when the doctor finally extracted the object, he proclaimed: “Baby out!”—to more wild cheering. The doctor then uncapped the container and started to spray the people gathered around the patient. At one point in the video, someone is shown taking a picture of the patient’s anus with a cell phone.
The incident might have remained in the realm of the hospital gossip grapevine or even part of urban legend had not the video been posted on YouTube, and thus broadcast all around the world, which is presumably how ABS-CBN got hold of the story.
Parts of the video have appeared on consecutive broadcasts of “TV Patrol,” the early evening newscast (I haven’t been able to check on “Bandila,” the late evening news show), and the story has received as well coverage on the network’s radio news.
The latest news I got is that the hospital administration, the Philippine Medical Association and even the Professional Regulation Commission are investigating the matter. The patient has also been reported to fear a whitewash since the doctor involved supposedly belongs to a prominent Cebu family. The speculation is that the more junior staff, including the student nurses, would be the ones left holding the bag.
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At first, it wasn’t clear to me if the patient was a man or a woman. But in case it was a woman, I was all the more horrified by the video, since shoving an object inside a woman’s vagina is a common occurrence in rapes, especially gang rapes. Studies show that most participants in gang rapes are rendered impotent by possibly the horror of the event, and so use an object as a “proxy penis.” Imagine being victimized in such a manner and then being subjected to the crass behavior of so-called medical professionals.
Reports say though that the patient is a man who had a drunken sexual encounter with another man last January. It then occurred to me that shoving the six-inch canister of body spray up the man’s anus could very well be the male or gay equivalent of rape with the use of an object. It is certainly no laughing matter or occasion for derision. People who spend years training for the privilege of healing others and relieving them of anxiety and pain have no business taking delight in the suffering of others.
At the very least, it is a violation of medical ethics, which call for doctors to first, “do no harm” to their patients, physically, mentally or morally. But by taking an unauthorized video of the procedure and then posting it on YouTube, everyone involved is also guilty of violating the patient’s privacy and subjecting him to public humiliation and ridicule.
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Reports say the man is determined to sue the people involved, with a hospital official saying more than 10 people were in the operating room at that time. (There are accounts that doctors and nurses in an adjacent operating room rushed to join in the gaiety when they heard about what was transpiring.)
I do hope something comes out of this incident, and that it will serve as a cautionary tale to those who think other people’s suffering is simply material for their coarse humor.
The really sad thing is that violations of medical ethics, especially transgressions against patients’ privacy and the confidentiality of information, take place all the time. When a celebrity checks into a hospital, hospital staff members are the first to spread the word. In one case I know of, doctors used their password to gain access to the medical record of a celebrity patient, and then passed the information on the Internet.
When AIDS was still “sexy” news, health personnel would be among the first to disclose the HIV status of patients, with the media abetting the ethical violation, reasoning that “public health” demanded that people be “warned” about people testing positive, as if their mere presence was enough to spread the disease.
At the very least, I hope this case opens the door for a serious public discussion of medical ethics, and of the need to observe the unwritten contract between doctor and patient, a contract that involves full disclosure under the protection of privacy and privilege.
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There’s trouble brewing in a subsidiary of a giant broadcast network. Word is that a sexual harassment suit has been filed against a senior official of the company by a female employee. The harassment is supposed to have taken place during a team-building session at a nearby resort when the senior official, a married man with two teenage daughters of his own, fondled and invited the complainant to his room. Even worse, all these attempts took place in front of most of the managers of the company, some of whom had been looked upon by the young employees as “father figures.”
I’m told that a formal complaint has already been filed against the official. It’ll be interesting to see how the network, whose senior managers are not shy about proclaiming their “Born Again” beliefs, will react to the complaint. Will they act with dispatch and punish the harasser, or will they simply ignore the complaint? From what I know, the complainant is not the first to be victimized by this serial harasser, but she is the first to file a formal complaint.
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