UNITED KINGDOM:  A British surgeon has been struck off after mistakenly removing a patient’s testicle and then lying to the man that it was still there but simply “small”.

Dr Marwan FAROUK removed the 60-year-old’s whole right testicle in 2014 during a laparoscopic repair of a bilateral hernia and excision of an epididymal cyst, the UK Medical Practitioners Tribunal found.

When the patient awoke, Dr FAROUK did not tell him that he’d removed the testicle.  He instead told him: “You have a small right testicle but it won’t give you any problems”.

The tribunal was told Dr FAROUK neglected to record the testicle removal in his operation notes.

When theatre staff suggested the tissue be sent to histology, he replied there was no need and instructed them to “chuck it”, before dumping the testicle in the sharps bin.

When he returned to retrieve it, he found nurses had already removed it.

Two weeks after the surgery, Dr FAROUK wrote to the patient’s GP that “some testicular tissue was damaged during the operation and was removed – this was confirmed on histology”.

The tribunal held that Dr FAROUK sought to mislead the patient and deliberately fudged the written record.

But it found he did not mislead the patient’s GP and that the act of returning to the theatre to retrieve the binned testicle was not dishonest but an “ill-judged” attempt to rectify the situation.

The tribunal accepted he was a proficient and well-respected surgeon but said it was not confident that he had acknowledged or accepted his “proven dishonesty” and ruled to strike him from the medical register.