He’s a celebrated urologist, but authorities are investigating his surgical practice
NEW YORK — After months of getting up several times a night to visit the bathroom, Peter Nadler was elated when Dr. David B. Samadi agreed to do his prostate surgery.
Samadi is a rare breed in medicine: a celebrity urologist. A regular medical expert on Fox News, he attracts international patients and boldface names, such as “Today Show” host Matt Lauer. His employer, Lenox Hill Hospital on Manhattan’s wealthy Upper East Side, built a luxurious wing where his patients are served gourmet meals. All that has helped make Samadi one of the country’s highest-paid surgeons, earning $6.7 million in 2015 as a specialist in robotic prostate surgery.
“He’s God,” Nadler, a 67-year-old retired restaurateur, recalled thinking when he met the doctor.
But after his June 2015 surgery for an enlarged prostate, Nadler began to wonder whether someone other than his famous urologist did the operation. Nadler barely saw Samadi that day and mostly remembered the doctor’s young assistants, he said. His urinary problems didn’t improve. Worse, he said, his libido vanished. Finally, this January he confronted the surgeon in Samadi’s posh Madison Avenue office: Did you do the operation or did someone else?
A lot of people are asking the same question. Samadi’s handling of his immense patient volume has become an extraordinary flashpoint in the growing national controversy over simultaneous surgery — the practice of one surgeon managing two or more procedures in the same time period. Samadi, chairman of urology at Lenox Hill, is under investigation by New York state regulators for allegedly improperly double-booking surgeries. Current and former medical personnel there have told regulators and the Globe that Samadi, while working on one case, routinely hands off simultaneous operations to unsupervised residents who are still learning how to do surgery. His residents have also complained to an accrediting agency that he doesn’t properly train them.
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