POWELL, OH – A plastic surgeon who apparently maintains a presence on TikTok consisting of dance routines and showing off portions of her medical procedures reportedly had her medical license suspended in connection with severe allegations of her not rendering the proper medical treatment to her patients.
Things are not looking too good for Dr. Katharine Roxanne “Roxy” Grawe in light of the news she received regarding his medical license this past November. The State Medical Board of Ohio suspended the surgeon’s license to practice as of November 18th in response to Grawe’s alleged substandard care of patients and her abysmal handling of patient privacy regarding her social media exploits.
According to State Medical Board of Ohio, the decision to suspend Grawe’s license was in response to the fact that her “continued practice presents danger of immediate and serious harm to the public.” And the specifics listed by the officials were unsettling on a number of fronts.
Within the first portion of the listed complaints leading to the surgeon’s license being suspended was in reference to a letter from October of 2018 where the secretary of the board warned Grawe that she needed to “maintain patient privacy when sharing photos or video via social media,” in which the surgeon reportedly responded to that letter in November of 2018 proclaiming that she “had remediated these concerns by instituting an updated patient consent form.”
Apparently, Grawe was contacted again by the secretary of the board in September of 2021, where she was “cautioned” again regarding “multifaceted issues with your care of these patients, including concerns regarding the lack of informed consent, ethical concerns related to privacy and social media, and avoidable complications that required surgical revision.”
Grawe was instructed in that September 2021 notice that she needed to take some “remedial education courses related to complications of plastic surgery and professionalism/ethics,” which Grawe provided certificates of completion for two relevant courses by December of 2021.
But according to State Medical Board of Ohio officials, Grawe continued to plaster her patients all over TikTok and other social media platforms – while even responding to online commenters in real time while she was performing surgeries.
“After your completion of these remedial education courses, you continued to video produce and live broadcast medical procedures of some patients, at least through on or about October 14, 2022. Aspects of these productions include, but are not limited to, preoperative photos, preoperative interviews with patients about their bodies, live streams of their procedures, postoperative still images of patients taken in the operating room, and the cost of the procedure. During some videos/live-streams you engage in dialogue to respond to viewers’ online questions while the surgical procedure remains actively ongoing.”
Imagine, if you will, literally being under the knife of a surgeon, and they suddenly divert their attention away from the precision required to tend to an incision or properly monitor one already made because they wanted to answer a fan of theirs watching them live on TikTok or Instagram – because that’s exactly what Grawe was doing.
The State Medical Board of Ohio referenced one patient in their letter to Grawe where the surgeon was actively performing a liposuction procedure while turning away from her patient to talk to her fans watching online.
“On or about March 21, 2022, you performed liposuction on the abdomen and arms, a ‘Brazilian Butt Lift,’ and Renuvion J-plasma procedure on abdomen and arms, under general endotracheal anesthesia at Roxy plastic surgery, your office setting. At this time you evaluated patient one as ASA/P2. You collected a total aspirate of 3700 CC. During the procedure, you broadcast on social media. While looking at the camera and speaking to the camera, you were engaged in liposuction of Patient 1’s abdomen. Despite liposuction being a blind surgery that requires awareness of the tip of the cannula to avoid injury, your attention to the camera meant at those moments you were not looking at the patient or palpating the location of the tip of the cannula. Further, you failed to provide or failed to document providing written discharge instructions to Patient 1 concerning specific information about lidocaine toxicity.”
Five days after that March 2022 procedure, emergency medical personnel responded to the patient’s home, and the individual was subsequently taken to an emergency room for an evaluation, where it was found that she had “free air in her abdomen and hepatic encephalopathy,” and further evaluations uncovered a “perforated small bowel and necrotizing soft tissue infection,” resulting in a lengthy hospital stay “with multiple debridements, open abdomen, and skin grafting.”
This is the horror story of just one of Grawe’s patients, as the letter pertaining to the surgeon’s license being suspended detailed two very similar patient experiences – where they’d get some kind of procedure from Grawe and wind up needing some kind of emergency surgery days after the fact.
There has to be something genuinely wrong with someone mentally if they’re willing to forego patient privacy and safety in the interest of boosting their social media profiles because mentally balanced individuals don’t think or behave in such a manner.
Albeit Grawe is still a human at the end of the day, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with a medical professional using social media, but hosting live-streams of patients’ procedures for all on TikTok and Instagram to watch is insane – especially when said spectacle occurs at the expense of the patients’ physical wellbeing.
This piece was written by Gregory Hoyt on December 8, 2022. It originally appeared in RedVoiceMedia.com and is used by permission.
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