CHENNAI: Apollo Hospitals has objected to allegations made in a petition filed by counsel for the Justice A Arumughaswamy commission probing former Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa’s death.
The petition is said to have alleged certain anomalies in the medical treatment provided to Jayalalithaa. It has especially highlighted the failure to perform angiography. In response to this, the hospital said Jayalalithaa was admitted with a severe case of septicemia and acute respiratory distress syndrome. “She was attended to by a highly experienced team of cardiologists and intensivists, pulmonologists, who monitored her cardiac status on a daily basis. There was no change in the status that necessitated an immediate angiogram,” the hospital said in a release.
Even on December 3, 2016, when AllMS doctors including Nitish Nayak, cardiologist, visited Jayalalithaa, they have submitted a report stating there was no necessity for any kind of cardiac investigation or intervention, the hospital claimed. Refuting the commission’s petition referring to three senior doctors who advised an angiogram, the hospital said an external doctor on December 25, 2016, visited her for a few minutes and suggested immediate angiogram without going into all the other co-morbidities, including her compromised respiratory condition, which could have potentially inhibited the desired outcome.
The Apollo team of doctors, including the cardiologist and Richard Beale, did not think it wise to rush into an angiogram based on this medical opinion from a doctor who wanted to perform the procedure and leave the country immediately with no commitment to her follow-up care.
“Enough medical evidence in the form of depositions of multiple doctors, ECHOS, TEES, ECGs, blood tests, have been already produced. Why is the Commission choosing to ignore the material evidence in this regard,” the hospital asked. “Apollo has produced enough medical evidence that there was no brain death at that time, as imputed in the petition. Complicated medical terminology stated in English have been incorrectly translated into Tamil. The complete context and meaning of medical facts have been lost in interpretation and translation.”
Doubts raised
Earlier, the commission’s counsel had filed a petition before the panel alleging that hospital delayed angiogram despite the procedure being recommended by a doctor. The advocate also allegedly charged that depositions of health secretary J Radhakrishnan and former chief secretary P Rama Mohan Rao contradicted with official government records with respect to Jayalalithaa’s health condition and sought to implead them as respondents