SANTA ANA, Calif. A California surgeon has been disciplined for removing a prisoner's healthy kidney and leaving the cancerous one intact.
The state medical board last week placed Dr. Charles Coonan Streit on probation for three years.
The board said Streit, a urologist who has had his license for 41 years, relied on memory to decide which kidney to remove because he didn't have access to the patient's medical records.
The 2012 operation at Fullerton's St. Jude Medical Center involved a 59-year-old federal inmate. The hospital was fined $100,000 by the California Department of Public Health because CT scans were left in an office on the day of the surgery.
The nurses and an anesthesiologist who assisted Streit in the kidney surgery told state inspectors that they asked the patient which kidney was diseased, and he told them the wrong side. The inmate underwent a second procedure to have the cancerous kidney removed.
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