An NYU Medical Center doctor phoned her bosses’ weight-loss surgery patients on the eve of their operations to warn them they could end up dead.
Surgical resident Neelu Pal, 40, was so spooked after a lap-band surgery patient died in 2006 that she spent the weekend anonymously phoning patients scheduled for surgery that Monday.
What she said scared the patients — and got her fired.
Pal filed a whistleblower lawsuit against NYU, claiming she was compelled to expose her bosses, now-married weight-loss surgery pioneers Drs. George Fielding and Christine Ren-Fielding, because they weren’t explaining risks or giving proper post-operative care to patients.
One patient about to have lap-band surgery — which uses a belt to cinch the stomach — recalled that Pal, posing as an operating-room nurse, said she “had watched many patients die from the procedure.”
Pal told the patient to “think about having the surgery someplace else,” according to court papers recently filed in the case, which revealed the findings of an internal investigation into the scandal at the NYU Center for Surgical Weight Loss. The center performs hundreds of bariatric procedures a year.
Another patient recalled Pal saying “there were serious quality issues with the bariatric surgery program” and being encouraged to “contact the state Department of Health.”
The patients contacted by Pal are not identified in lawsuit papers in Manhattan federal court, but one is described as a top Bank of America executive.
George Fielding in March operated on New York Jets coach Rex Ryan.
Pal confessed to being the anonymous caller phoning patients after an NYU investigation fingered her, according to court documents.
Pal was suspended and fired for making the calls. Her bosses described the calls as an “attempt to scare patients into canceling their treatment” and an “egregious example of unprofessional and irresponsible behavior.”
The tragic patient, Rhonda Freiberg, died after going into cardiac arrest in January 2006, just 36 hours after George Fielding and a second doctor, a plastic surgeon, operated on her.
A review by the state Department of Health found NYU failed to properly monitor her in the hours after surgery and faulted her doctors for putting Freiberg on “a regular medical floor” after “four hours of complex surgery.” They did not respond to her negligible urine output, which signaled something was wrong.
Pal assisted during the surgery and tried to alert Fielding to post-operative problems, her lawyer claimed.
A lawyer for NYU, Mercedes Colwin, said Fielding and Ren-Fielding “are superb surgeons.”
Colwin said Freiberg’s death — over which NYU paid the family a $973,000 malpractice settlement — was “an isolated incident.”
Pal is now a law student in New Jersey.