Informed Consent and Boar Tusks

An oral surgeon who temporarily implanted fake boar tusks in his
assistant's mouth as a practical joke while she was under general
anesthesia and got sued for it was awarded $750K profit beyond his out
of court settlement with this assistant, in a Washington state supreme
court decision against his insurance company.

(Summarized and paraphrased from an MSNBC story). There's an underlying Associated Press snippet all the newspapers seemed to have, since this showed up in my own Arizona Republic and the Houston Chronicle.

???

Why isn't installing extraneous hardware into a patient and taking
embarrassing photos while she's under anesthesia a gross violation of
medical ethics? What legitimate diagnostic, curative, or palliative
purpose did that element of the procedure have? If none, then it introduced unnecessary distraction, risk, and time under
anesthesia, yes?

Why isn't this dentist having his license revoked by a medical ethics
board? Why isn't he facing criminal assault charges?

And why does it make any sense for everyone else's insurance premiums
to be higher so that society can reward this misbehavior?

It seems like this court is ignoring years of relatively hard-earned
progress in legal understanding of patients' rights, of professional
ethics, and of the limitations and context of consent, to return to an
old-boys-club chauvinistic ha ha harassment is just a big joke approach.

Seems to me insurance ought to cover honest mistakes, not deliberate
misbehavior. Premiums would be lower if it didn't cover this
nonsense.

Apparently a healthy majority of respondents to this unscientific, informal poll would agree.


PS: A law-school-educated friend of mine points out that the Associated Press article may not have fully reflected the nuances of the underlying holding, which apparently was more about duty to defend than actual liability to insure against the damages, and hinged on whether it is conceivable that the matter under dispute fell under the scope of the insurance.

I still think this is ridiculous, just in a more nuanced way.