A top United States surgeon who specialises in transgender operations is being sued by two patients who claim their procedures at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) left them with deformed genitals, reports Daily Mail.
The anonymous transgender men have filed separate lawsuits over their “botched” phalloplasties by Dr Curtis Cetrulo, a renowned plastic surgeon who performed the first successful penis transplant in America in 2016, and who worked at MGH’s Transgender Health Programme.
The lawsuits claim that the “delayed abdominal phalloplasty” surgeries on both patients were “untested and experimental” procedures that resulted in severe complications.
According to the court filings, a delayed abdominal phalloplasty is a staged procedure that uses skin from the abdomen to construct a penis.
One patient claimed the operation left him with a “severely deformed, scarred and non-functional structure that was intended to serve as phallus”.
The patient said doctors ultimately had to remove it.
The other patient, a transgender man from Massachusetts, said the botched surgery has caused his wife to suffer the “severe restriction of the benefit of the full services, society, and affection of (him)”.
“The phalloplasty … ultimately failed, causing the patient to require extensive additional medical treatment including but not limited to revision phalloplasty,” the lawsuit said.
Both patients claim they suffered severe complications, including having their surgical wounds split open, catheter leakage, urinary complications and infections.
Cetrulo left MGH in 2023 to join the plastic surgery department at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles.
An MGH spokeswoman denied that Cetrulo’s surgeries were experimental, but declined to comment further.
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