Dr Charlie Teo left a ‘black hole’ after removing brain

Neurosurgeon Charlie Teo left a ‘black hole’ in a patient’s head after he removed a quarter of her brain in an operation to remove a tumor, a hearing was reported.

The Health Care Complaints Commission is investigating complaints that two brain tumor operations left patients with catastrophic brain injuries.

Post-operative scans shown to the audience showed that, in one case, Mr. Teo had removed almost the entire right frontal lobe of the woman’s brain.

Half of her tumor was said to be mixed with normal brain tissue.

“I have been practicing since 1965 and this would be one of the biggest resections I have ever seen,” Professor Bryan Stokes told the hearing.

He said it was almost guaranteed to make the patient worse off neurologically, but he said that Mr. Teo admitted in his preoperative report that it would leave the patient worse off but prolong her life.

However, the woman’s husband told the committee that it had not been disclosed before the 2019 operation that a significant part of her brain would be removed.

The disciplinary hearing into Mr. Teo’s conduct is investigating whether two patients of the star neurosurgeon gave proper consent to surgeries from which they never recovered.

The 61-year-old woman was terminally ill at the time of surgery in February 2019 and later became a vegetative state, before dying a month later.

Professor Andrew Morokoff said surgeons “usually remove normal brain cells; it usually doesn’t change the risk profile.”

But he added: “With this, resection of a large part of the normal brain, including critical structures, will substantially increase the risk.”

Teo became famous for performing neurosurgery on cancer patients with tumors that other doctors considered inoperable.

But it has been accused of charging exorbitant fees and offering false hope to some patients.

In one case, Mr. Teo told the patient that if she did not have surgery by the following Tuesday, she would be “fucking dead by Friday,” her husband told the hearing.

Medical consent experts Paul Komesaroff and Chris Ryan told the hearing Thursday that the risk needed to be conveyed to patients to allow them to give informed consent.

Professor Ryan said that consent could be derived from one session, but that patients needed to be given sufficient time to weigh the issues to their own satisfaction.

HCCC attorney Kate Richardson SC asked experts if it should be disclosed if the risk of neurological deficit or death from a procedure was between 30 and 50 percent.

They agreed that it should.

“For many people, the risk of profound neurological deficit would be even more worrisome than death,” said Professor Komesaroff.

“One could even raise the question (of) whether to go ahead with a procedure like that.”

On Wednesday, neurology experts Morokoff, Bryant Stokes and Paul D’Urso told the inquiry that it was common during the course of operations to remove healthy brain tissue without first informing the patient.

“I think every neurosurgeon in the country would be guilty of failing to state that they are removing normal brain tissue when they are removing a brain tumor,” Professor D’Urso said.

You wouldn’t have anything else to do but have neurosurgeons on your committee if that was the line you took.

The NSW Medical Council banned Mr Teo from operating without another doctor’s approval in August 2021 after an investigation by the state’s health care complaints commission.

He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Post-op scans shown to the audience showed that, in one case, Charlie Teo (pictured) had removed almost the entire right frontal lobe of the woman’s brain.

According to a list of factual assumptions produced at Wednesday’s hearing, Mr. Teo slapped one of the patients in front of family members in an attempt to wake her up after surgery.

The patient was essentially left in a vegetative state after the operation intended to extend her life expectancy by several months.

Outside the audience, Teo told the media that slapping was a “kinder and gentler” alternative to more common techniques for waking patients.

He said he had no regrets about performing brain surgeries that were the focus of the investigation because he was acting in the best interest of the patients.

“I did it in their best interest, thinking it was going to help them, it wasn’t,” he said.

But Professor Stokes told the hearing: “From my point of view this is really assault, it is totally inappropriate.”