Doctor Who Livestreamed Surgeries on TikTok Has License Yanked, Thank God
An Ohio plastic surgeon was banned from practicing medicine after live-streaming procedures on her TikTok account. Katharine Grawe spoke into a camera and answered viewers’ questions on her social media account while conducting surgeries, which the Ohio Medical Board determined harmed patients and violated their privacy.
“Dr. Grawe’s social media was more important to her than the lives of the patients she treated,” one board member said at Grawe’s hearing.
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It wasn’t just the livestreaming, either. Grawe’s license was first suspended in November 2022 following complaints from former patients who said they suffered from post-operation injuries. The post-op problems required multiple surgeries to fix, according to the Ohio assistant attorney general. The suspension was pending a formal hearing that ultimately found that not only had Grawe violated her patients’ right to privacy, but she also endangered and in some cases harmed them. The board issued a fine of $4,500 in addition to revoking her license, saying it is “based on her failure to meet standard of care,” a board spokesperson told NBC News.
The board does not have the ability to ban medical practitioners outside the state, but when a physician’s license is suspended, they are banned from practicing medicine, or they are disciplined in any way, that information is reported to the National Practitioner Databank. The NPDB then posts the disciplinary action online which healthcare professionals can access.
“The board had reason to believe that Dr. Grawe’s practice, with respect to three patients, fell below the standard of care,” Assistant Attorney General Melinda Ryan Snyder said in May, CBS Austin reported. “In 2022, Dr. Grawe live streamed a surgery of a patient, in this case, identified as Patient One, who ended up being injured by that procedure. The patient was found to have six puncture wounds in the small intestines. She had to have multiple surgeries to repair those injuries.”
The board had warned Grawe about livestreaming the surgeries in 2018 amid fears that it violated ethics practices and patient privacy and listed three patients who had been affected by Grawe’s potential malpractice. An unnamed woman had suffered from a perforated intestine a week after her surgery which was live-streamed on Grawe’s TikTok while another patient had severe damage and bacterial infections in her abdomen and reported the levels of toxins in her blood had caused a loss of brain function.
At the hearing on Wednesday, Grawe began by asking the board for leniency and requested they not ban her from practicing medicine in Ohio. “I ask you from the bottom of my heart to please consider my thoughts with an open mind. This has humbled me more than you can know,” she said, according to CBS Austin. “I am willing to change my social media practices, and I will never livestream a surgery again.”
The board member’s reactions were unchanged, according to the outlet, and one said, “We’ve seen an extreme lack of professionalism. Her posts are done as a marketing ploy.”
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