DEFUNIAK SPRINGS, Fla. (AP) — A grand jury indicted a Florida doctor on a manslaughter charge for allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen during a 2024 surgery.
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The prosecutor for the First Judicial Circuit on Monday announced the charge of second-degree manslaughter against Dr. Thomas Shaknovsky.
Prosecutors said that during an Aug. 21, 2024, surgery, which was scheduled to be a laparoscopic splenectomy, Shaknovsky removed the victim’s liver instead of his spleen. That resulted in “catastrophic blood loss and the patient’s death on the operating table,” law enforcement officials wrote in a press release, The patient was a 70-year-old man from Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
“Our duty is to follow the facts wherever they lead, without fear or favor,” Walton County Sheriff Michael Adkinson said in a statement.
Available court records did not name an attorney for Shaknovsky.
Florida suspended Shaknovsky’s medical license after the surgery. Records show he voluntarily surrendered his medical license in Alabama after regulators moved to revoke his license.
Yep, pretty bad.
Unfortunaetly that doesnt mean this butcher wont practice in another state or country. There is no national or international database of incompetent doctors. Any medical student that has completeted gross anatomy in the lab knows the difference between a liver & a Spleen. I hope that this hack is convicted and serves a long hard sentence.
Was he drinking or on drugs?
scary
Wonder if the patient had situs inversus a rare condition where the organs are flipped around to the wrong side of the body, for some reason the patient was picked up for having a large mass organ on the left side, which is where the spleen would normally be it was mistakenly presumed to be the spleen the Doctor Who was not particularly thoughtful about the situation and did not have any colleagues to discuss the case with went ahead and removed it only to discover he made a fatal error.
This is a honest mistake.
He just needs some more education and he will be fine
Medical mistakes happen all of the time. It makes no sense for a doctor to be charged with manslaughter unless they can prove negligence and not an accident.