What have you done to me Lanzer clinic patients reveal more harrowing experiences

Suzanne Steward remembers the ambulance sirens blaring as she was rushed to hospital after both lungs were punctured following a liposuction procedure at Dr Daniel Lanzer’s cosmetic surgery clinic in Malvern, in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.

“I remember seeing Lanzer at my feet and I yelled at him and I said, “What have you done to me? I can’t breathe…” she recounts.

She was taken to Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital in March this year and one expert who reviewed the medical records says she could have died. “The records and CT scans show both lungs had been punctured and it was iatrogenic, which means, caused by a doctor,” says Mark Ashton, professor of surgery at Melbourne University. She had extensive bruising and required a blood transfusion due to a major loss of blood. “The scan shows her heart and trachea had shifted…that she had a tension pneumothorax. It was a life-threatening time-critical emergency”.

Dr Lanzer is one of the country’s most famous cosmetic surgeons, with his own TV show and a social media footprint of more than 5 million followers. But on October 29, he gave the regulator a legally enforceable undertaking to stop practicing medicine in Australia. The regulator said inquiries into Dr Lanzer’s clinics were ongoing.

It came days after a joint investigation by The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the ABC’s Four Corners uncovered a litany of disturbing practices in his network of clinics including allegations of serious hygiene and safety breaches and botched procedures in a sector that is loosely regulated.

WARNING: THIS STORY CONTAINS GRAPHIC IMAGES OF A PATIENT’S WOUND POST-SURGERY

Since the initial investigation, more than 100 Lanzer clinic patients, including Ms Steward, have come forward to share their harrowing experiences. One former patient, Emma, says she went through “two years of living hell” after a tummy tuck left her with a “putrid” wound that required three separate operations to fix. Hope Lemm ended up in hospital with an infection after a mega liposuction procedure that removed 10 litres of fat from her body, while others described botched surgeries including one woman who had a facelift, and ended up with an infection and scarring. One man who had surgery to treat gynaecomastia, commonly referred to as “man boobs”, suffered from months of extreme pain after the procedure and was left with damaged nipples.

The investigation has obtained video footage of one of the Lanzer clinic doctors, Dr Daniel Aronov, doing a mock re-enactment of Ms Steward’s pneumothorax (punctured lung) emergency. (Dr Aronov said he had no involvement in her liposuction procedure.)

In the video, made for his colleagues eyes only, Dr Aronov portrays the anaesthetist as being more concerned about retrieving a device allegedly stuck under the patient and sends up Dr Lanzer as interrupting the paramedics to show off his equipment as the paramedic tries to save the woman’s life. “Hey guys, I think I left my oxygen SATs probe under the patient. Do you mind if we just get it out?” Dr Aronov says in his mock re-enactment of the anaesthetist’s role in the emergency.

“If I can just reach around from under there, I reckon I can get it. Can you guys give me a hand,” he continues, only this time holding a medical instrument and pretends to tug and pull it from underneath the unconscious patient. The video acts out Dr Lanzer’s role during the emergency event. “Does anyone need my pneumothorax kit? I brought my pneumothorax kit. Does someone want to use my pneumothorax kit.” Then comes the paramedic’s turn: “Open your eyes, darling. Can you hear me?” referring to the patient, who, at the time, was drifting in and out of consciousness.

The video, sent to his 65 colleagues in Australia and the Philippines on a messaging platform soon after Ms Steward’s admission to hospital elicited the following responses : “Oh my gosh I feel I shouldn’t laugh but this nearly had me in stitches,” one colleague says. Another says, “Hahahahahahaha,” while another says “OMG.”

Dr Aronov, who has 13 million TikTok followers and is being investigated after another patient reported him and Dr Lanzer to the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), tells staff in an internal communication, “I still have half an hour of Instagrams to upload and many TikToks to make. Totally worth it!”

In a statement, Dr Aronov said he was not mocking the patient, but rather it was a “self-mocking” video. “The video was not about the patient who was not even mentioned in it. It was a self-mocking reflection of the events aimed at boosting staff morale,” he said.

He said the video was made well after the patient was stabilised and well after a lengthy team debrief. “There is very solid evidence in the scientific literature to promote the use of such humour after a stressful medical emergency as a way to reduce anxiety and has even been suggested to improve patient outcomes”.

Ms Steward was shown the video and didn’t see the humour. “Does he think it’s funny? I’d like to see it happen to him.”

“You don’t make a joke about something like that... No, you’re disgusting.”

Documents received from a freedom of information request to Ambulance Victoria show two ambulances were called to collect patients from Dr Lanzer’s Malvern clinic in the past nine months. Ms Steward, who was taken to the Alfred on March 3, was one of them. The other, on July 2, describes a patient as “unconscious” with “fainting episodes”.

A separate FOI request to the Alfred Hospital reveals another patient was transferred there in late May 2021 with a pneumothorax, or collapsed lung, following liposuction at the Malvern clinic. The FOI confirms that the hospital made an official notification to AHPRA about Dr Lanzer and one of his nurses, after the nurse visited the pneumothorax patient without approval from the hospital, changed her wound dressings “which posed potential risks”, failed to abide by Chief Health Officer directives in relation to reasons to visit a patient in hospital and failed to undertake a COVID screening despite signage “which put staff and patients at risk” and organised a telehealth conference with the patient and Dr Lanzer to discuss a pain and wound strategy.

The letter of complaint says the Lanzer clinic nurse visited the patient the following day and again failed to be screened for COVID at entry. It also said the hospital made repeated calls to Dr Lanzer to get the patient’s medical records but he did not return calls “as would be expected following a surgical complication”.

“My legs aren’t pretty but what affected me the most was the way I was treated. It was mentally scarring.”

Patient Hope Lemm

The Alfred’s letter to AHPRA said it was concerned the nurse had contravened her professional code of conduct in the provision of care. “We consider Dr Lanzer’s practice is not consistent with good medical practice” as outlined in AHPRA’s code of conduct for doctors in Australia.

Some patients end up in hospital via car, which is more difficult to trace. In January, Ms Lemm went to Ballarat Hospital’s emergency department with an infection after 10 litres of fat and fluids were removed in one liposuction procedure, which is almost double the recommended safe upper limit.

She had lipedema, a painful hereditary disorder which causes fat accumulation in different parts of the body, and went to Dr Lanzer for treatment. She said she left the Melbourne day procedure clinic at 2am, feeling faint and oozing blood and liquids. “A nurse told me, ‘we need to go home,’” she says. “I was vomiting and feeling light-headed,” she said.

Lanzer clinic patient Hope LemmCredit:Jason South

Ms Lemm deteriorated over the following days and eventually ended up in emergency at Ballarat Hospital with an infection. She says she tried to page Dr Lanzer and when she finally got through, he was unimpressed she had gone to hospital. “He said he highly doubted it was an infection,” she said.

Ms Lemm said she still suffers from fluid retention. “My legs aren’t pretty but what affected me the most was the way I was treated,” she said. “It was mentally scarring.“

In the past 30 years regulators have received a series of complaints about Dr Lanzer but little or nothing has been done. Some lodged complaints with AHPRA but the regulator decided not to take further action. Some went to state regulators, again with little or no action.

Former staff allege that nurses filled in blank scripts and that hygiene standards were “extremely poor”.

Pictures taken inside the clinics of Dr Lanzer show human fat stored in kitchen fridges, syringes sitting alongside water bottles, and surgical instruments stored in a suitcase.

WARNING: THIS STORY CONTAINS GRAPHIC IMAGES OF A PATIENT’S WOUND POST-SURGERY

Former employee nurse Justin Nixon and nurse Lauren Hewish decided to speak up after witnessing some practices that didn’t sit comfortably with them, including the questionable treatment of patients, fake reviews and the gaming of audits including staff told to take home human fat in plastic shopping bags ahead of regulator audits and then to bring it back.

Nurse Nixon said the most harrowing case he witnessed at Dr Lanzer’s was patient Emma, a name she requested we use to protect her identity, who had a tummy tuck and liposuction in March 2019 that went horribly wrong. Two weeks after the procedure her abdomen had swelled and her skin had turned purple. Instead of getting treated in Queensland, where she lived, Dr Lanzer told her it was best to fly to Melbourne for treatment by him.

Images of tummy tuck patient Emma

Her plastic surgeon Dr Drew Cronin, who recently did reconstruction surgery on her abdomen, said this alone was incredibly dangerous. “Abdominoplasty patients that have post-operative bleeding need to be treated urgently. They can lose a lot of blood into their abdomen, which can cause them to go into shock, and potentially die. They should be sent urgently, preferably by ambulance, to the closest Emergency Department for fluid resuscitation and urgent transfer to theatre to have the haematoma washed out and the source of bleeding fixed.

“The most concerning part of this story is that she was advised to jump on a flight and head back to Melbourne. The worst place you can be if you start to run out of blood is at 30,000 feet on a commercial flight. There is nothing anyone can do at that point to help you.”

Images of tummy tuck patient Emma

When she arrived, nurse Nixon assisted Dr Lanzer and Dr Aronov, who reopened the wound, washed inside the abdominal wall and re-stapled her, with local anaesthetic instead of general anaesthetic. “The pain was excruciating. I have no other words to explain it. Pain that I have never felt in my life,” Emma said. “I had honestly thought I was going to die”.

Emma’s husband was moved upstairs, where he could not hear the screams. “During the surgery Dr Lanzer and Dr Aronov were smiling, laughing and cracking jokes. I don’t know if they were trying to put me at ease or if they just didn’t care,” she said.

“Multiple times during the surgery I sat up in a jack-knife position howling in pain. Screaming and begging for the surgery to be over. They told me that they needed to continue.”

Professor Ashton, the former president of the Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons, describes the procedure as “barbaric”. “In the presence of infection, local anaesthetic either doesn’t work at all, or is so weak in its effectiveness that you’re effectively operating without local anaesthetic at all,” he said.

Over the following weeks the infection spread and began to rot. “I have vivid memories of my bedroom smelling putrid and my daughter telling me that my wound smelt foul,” she says. Part of Dr Lanzer’s treatment included supplying a bottle of Dakin’s solution, made from bleach, to treat the infection. He also prescribed antibiotics which, according to one internal message from a nurse to other nursing staff, says: “A lot of chemists won’t serve her anymore because she’s been on antibiotics for so long and nobody is sending originals so they won’t give her anymore. Lol”.

Sick from the wound and the side effects of prolonged use of antibiotics - Emma finally saw a GP. “She was mortified when she saw the state of my abdomen, which had grown putrid, and called an infectious disease specialist and wanted to admit me to the hospital that day,” she says. Dr Lanzer told her he would arrange a plastic surgeon he knew in Melbourne. She was hospitalised at The Avenue Private Hospital for 12 days.

Multiple times during the surgery I sat up in a jack-knife position howling in pain. Screaming and begging for the surgery to be over. They told me that they needed to continue.

Clinic patient Emma

While in hospital in Melbourne, Emma said she had a strange late-night visitor. “Dr Lanzer visited me and my husband in hospital at nine o’clock at night, with sunglasses and a hat on”.

“(He) told us a ridiculous story - that he was out jogging past the hospital and wanted to drop by to say hello.”

“He asked us lots of questions as to whether or not other doctors and nurses were asking questions about him. He seemed more concerned about his own reputation and what I might have told people than my health.

“He told me and my husband not to listen to anyone that says a bad word about him, that lots of other doctors are jealous of him and would like to cause him trouble”.

Emma has had ongoing health issues and recently had a fourth surgery to fix her abdominal muscles. Dr Cronin said it was the worst complications he had ever seen. “This patient’s complications and final-outcome were the worst that I’d seen, worse than any I’d even heard about. The skin on the lower half of her abdomen was completely replaced with thick scar tissue, right down onto her abdominal muscles. She described chronic, daily pain in the area, particularly when performing everyday tasks”.

“Since repairing these issues, the patient’s condition has improved significantly, but she still has areas of scarring and still describes episodes of pain,” he said. Dr Lanzer declined to comment but has previously said he has thousands of happy patients and his business had the highest standards of hygiene and safety. “I do not think that there’s a surgeon in the world who could show a better safety record than I’ve done over the last 30 years,” he said.

Dr Aronov said he was not involved in Emma’s initial liposuction or tummy tuck or any decisions or directions regarding her aftercare or management.

“I was only called in at short notice to assist with her care on the evening of the 30th of March. This was the first knowledge I had of her,” he said.

More than two years on, Emma is still suffering the physical and mental anguish of what she went through. She decided to speak up. “I have remained quiet for so long because I have not been able to acknowledge what has actually been done to me. It has been too distressing to do so. I have always been a pick yourself up and move on type of person. But … I am terrified that more people will have to go through what I have been through,” she says.

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Adele Ferguson is a Gold Walkley Award winning investigative journalist. She reports and comments on companies, markets and the economy.Connect via Twitter or email.

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