Good morning. Five stories today, and three of them are about habit: the test ordered because it is always ordered, the fast nobody ever validated, the plan changed without a word in the file. We start on a dura that was already thinned before anyone touched it.
— DR. ADITYA SETH, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
01 · THE LEAD
MEDICOLEGAL
Changing the plan was not the mistake. So what was?
An extruded disc at L4-5 had cost him the use of his right leg, and he was a difficult candidate for any operation: an old stroke, a seizure history, a previous carotid endarterectomy, and a cigarette habit he had not given up. Pulmonary testing cleared him at moderate risk and the L4 laminectomy went ahead. The disc fragment had fused to a dura already thinned and ballooned by years of compression, and separating the two tore it. A fat graft went in, the closure was watertight, and both he and his brother were told in recovery.
He went home on day four. On day six the dressing was wet and he was back at eleven at night. The reassessment form filled in on day eight records a plan for secondary suturing. The wound got sealant. Nothing in the file gives a reason for the change, and nothing on record shows he was told about it. The hospital then filed literature in its own support which says a standalone sealant fails more often than sealant with sutures, handing the bench the evidence that the plan it had dropped was the better one.

He flew out on day thirteen with the leak still running, and a surgeon in Kansas closed it on day twenty with prolene. The tear was that small. What had gathered around it in the fifteen days it sat open was the injury: roughly 150 cc of cerebrospinal fluid, two-thirds of a cup, with disc and bone fragments in it. Fluid and debris against bare nerve roots inflame them until they stick together, and that does not reverse. A revision at two years, and a year after that the name for his returning pain was chronic arachnoiditis.
None of it should have reached a hearing. Last contact was March 2021 and the complaint was filed in February 2025, well outside the limitation period. The hospital lost that argument because his lawyer had demanded the complete treatment record in writing and never got a reply. With no proof the file had ever been handed over, the commission held the cause of action was still running. ₹18.53 crore claimed. ₹20 lakh awarded.
WHY IT MATTERS
Write the reason the same day you change the plan. The commission never faulted the sealant. It faulted the gap where the reason should have been.
Record that you told the patient. Consent to an operation is not consent to every decision taken after it, and an affidavit four years later does not create a conversation.
Read every page of the literature you file. Theirs is the document that proved the case against them.
02 · PATIENT SAFETY
Five children, glimepiride instead of paracetamol, and a blood sugar with nothing to correct
Immunisation day runs on a script. The shots go in, paracetamol goes home, because a mild fever afterwards is expected. At a Mamta Diwas session in Palsana taluka, reports say five children were handed a sulfonylurea made for adults with type 2 diabetes, a tablet whose entire job is to tell the pancreas to release more insulin. Four have been discharged. One is still admitted. The nurse is suspended and two doctors have show-cause notices. What the two specialists quoted want understood is not what happens in the first hour. It is what happens after that.
03 · CLINICAL
Cardiac clearance before surgery: the new AHA guideline rates four routine tests “no benefit”
A surveillance committee went looking for a reason to revise the 2024 text and found none, so the recommendations, figures and references came back identical. Resting ECG, echo for LV function, stress testing, CT coronary angiography: all Class 3, which is the strongest way this document says don’t. The assessment the guideline does endorse is free, takes ten seconds, and beat the anaesthetist’s own read of the patient in a head-to-head. Ask whether the patient can climb two flights of stairs.?
04 · RESEARCH

121 Blood Tests, One Question: Does Fasting Actually Change the Result?
Every earlier attempt compared a patient who had fasted four hours against a different patient who had fasted fourteen, which mostly measures who turns up at 9 a.m. and who turns up at 3 p.m. This Korean group found people who had the same test twice, once after a short fast and once after a long one, and set each person against himself. Twenty-seven tests looked shifted by food the old way. Seventeen of those vanished. Between hour eight and hour twelve nothing improved at all, and nine in ten samples in the dataset had been drawn later than that. Two tests run the other way entirely, and one of them sends starved patients to hepatology.
05 · IN MEMORIAM
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Doctors
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Dr Sachin Kandhari, the neurosurgeon who brought epidural stimulation to India, has died at 50
Managing director of IBS Hospital in New Delhi, about two decades spent on the injuries most people call permanent. Epidural stimulation for paraplegic patients from 2017. The Cyberdyne HAL system in November 2020. Finetech-Brindley sacral neuromodulation, which never makes a headline and very often decides whether a person lives outside a hospital at all. A cardiac arrest ended it this week.
06 · QUICK HITS
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