With so many problems from botched surgeries you would think a patient would be able to request this.
In: Technology
The ‘surgeons find it distracting’ argument many people in this thread have made is both incorrect and shows little understanding of how modern surgery works.
In the vast majority of surgeries it is not only possible to record video and capture still images easily with no distractions, it is in fact very common – especially in minimally invasive procedures. So if a surgeon is telling you it can’t be done it’s because they don’t want your dad trying to bring his impossible to sterilise camcorder he got for Christmas in 1998 into a clinical environment (SOURCE: I work in medical tech).
Most surgeons will happily show you images or videos of your operation if you ask to see it. The issues arise when providing you with a copy of it – any images or videos taken are stored in a system called a PACS (scans and x-rays are stored here too), and contains DICOM metadata that doesn’t just relate to the patient but also has details of the clinicians and other key information – this is a globally used standard way of managing patient imaging and in some cases hospitals ban staff from any sort of medical imaging or photography that doesn’t conform to this standard.
Most PACS providers assume that the media will be stored and only used/accessed within the hospital as part of the patient record so provide no way to reliably scrub that metadata. The way data protection is handled in a medical setting is much more hardcore, and for good reason, which means the hospital will refuse to hand over copies to avoid legal issues.
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