Leading GOP candidate and brain-surgeon Ben Carson just got hit by hostile research into his 15,000 medical operations.
“The people who oppose me have been crawling through every ditch, every place I’ve ever been my whole life looking for stuff,” he responded to Fox News Radio host Alan Colmes.
“They found five or six disgruntled people, that’s a very small number, and many of those cases never went anywhere, because the legal system said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ and threw it out,” he said.
“There have been a couple of cases that were settled,” he added, before saying he could not talk about the lawsuits.
This line of attack against Carson is likely to continue, partly because he has not been a politician so he has not played a role in the federal government’s 1996-2008 real-estate bubble, the post-2008 foreign policy meltdowns, myriad crony-government scandals, out-of-control immigration rush, or the decades-long slowdown in middle-class economic prosperity.
The anti-Carson hit was delivered by National Enquirer, which has a good reputation in the media for researching stories that might prompt painful lawsuits. The publication suggested — but did not say — it alone launched the research. “The NATIONAL Enquirer has exclusively learned… The Enquirer uncovered complaints dating back to 1986,” it wrote.
The Oct. 7 article described six lawsuits during Carson’s 27-year career. That’s one lawsuit every 4.5 years, or one lawsuit for every 2,500 brain-surgeries.
“A 69-year-old Florida woman claimed her eardrums were perforated during a 2008 operation for facial pain performed by Carson’s team.
When the pain recurred, Carson told the patient, Darlene King, that she might have a tumor. But surgery revealed the lump was actually ‘a sponge he had left in (her) brain’!
Yet another Florida woman, Merryl Reynolds, accused Carson of negligence during 2010 spinal surgery on her 15-year-old son, Austin. He ‘is now paralyzed from the waist down,’ she claimed.”
“My reaction is that I did 15,000 operations,” Carson told Colmes. “Generally speaking, there is no one who does the number of operations that I did who aren’t going to find some people who are going to be disgruntled.”
He also suggested that legal settlements restrict his ability to talk about the medical cases. “I would probably find myself in some difficulty if I do begin to discuss that stuff publicly.”
Colmes asked about one case where a patient said he left part of a small surgical sponge inside her brain when completing her brain operation. “It is true that we put a certain type of sponge in to pad things away and sometimes there is a reaction to that sponge and that’s what happened,” Carson said.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.