Aftermath News

Associated Press | May 11, 2008

By KEVIN FREKING

WASHINGTON - Families claiming that a mercury-based preservative in vaccines triggers autism will challenge mainstream medicine Monday as they take their case to a federal court.

They seek vindication and financial redress from a government fund that helps people injured by shots.

Two 10-year-old boys from Portland, Ore., will serve as the test cases that determine whether the children and their families should be compensated. Attorneys for the boys will attempt to show the boys were happy, healthy and developing normally. But, after being exposed to vaccines with thimerosal, they began to regress and show symptoms of autism.

Thimerosal has been removed in recent years from standard childhood vaccines, except the flu shot. In 2004, a committee with the Institute of Medicine concluded there was no credible evidence that vaccines containing thimerosal caused autism.

Overall, nearly 4,900 families have filed claims with the U.S. Court of Claims alleging that vaccines caused autism and other neurological problems in their children. Lawyers for the families will present three different theories of how vaccines caused autism.

The case beginning Monday focuses on the second of those theories: that thimerosal-containing vaccines alone cause autism. Lawyers for the petitioning families said they will present evidence that injections with thimerosal deposit a form of mercury in the brain. That mercury excites certain brain cells that stay chronically activated trying to get rid of the intrusion.

“In some kids, there’s enough of it that it sets off this chronic neuroinflammatory pattern that can lead to regressive autism,” said attorney Mike Williams.

In the end, the families’ attorneys hope to convince a special master of the U.S. Court of Claims that thimerosal belongs on the list of causes for the inflammation that leads to regressive autism.

To win, the attorneys for the two boys, William Mead and Jordan King, will have to show that it”s more likely than not that the vaccine actually caused the injury.

Many members of the medical community are skeptical of the families’ claims. They worry that the claims about the dangers of vaccines could cause some people to forgo vaccines that prevent illness.

“I think that what’s so endearing to me about the anti-vaccine people is they’re perfectly willing to go from one hypothesis to the next without a backward glance,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Autism is a developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life and affects a person’s ability to communicate and interact with others. Dr. Andrew Gerber, a psychiatrists, said that medical experts don’t have a comprehensive understanding of what causes autism, but they do know there is a strong hereditary component.

Toxins from the environment could play a role, but currently, data does not support that they do, Gerber said.

Arguments are scheduled to go on throughout the month. A final decision could take several more months to occur. Claims that are successful would result in compensation taking into account lost earnings after age 18 and up to $250,000 for pain and suffering.

The families or the federal government can also appeal the decision of the special master to the Court of Federal Claims or to a federal appeals court.

While there have been about 5,000 claims relating to autism, there have been fewer than 3,000 claims for all other vaccines.

Doctors to decide who lives and who dies in coming pandemic

Who should MDs let die in a pandemic? Report offers answers

AP | May 5, 2008

By LINDSEY TANNER

CHICAGO (AP) — Doctors know some patients needing lifesaving care won’t get it in a flu pandemic or other disaster. The gut-wrenching dilemma will be deciding who to let die.

Now, an influential group of physicians has drafted a grimly specific list of recommendations for which patients wouldn’t be treated. They include the very elderly, seriously hurt trauma victims, severely burned patients and those with severe dementia.

The suggested list was compiled by a task force whose members come from prestigious universities, medical groups, the military and government agencies. They include the Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services.

The proposed guidelines are designed to be a blueprint for hospitals “so that everybody will be thinking in the same way” when pandemic flu or another widespread health care disaster hits, said Dr. Asha Devereaux. She is a critical care specialist in San Diego and lead writer of the task force report.

The idea is to try to make sure that scarce resources — including ventilators, medicine and doctors and nurses — are used in a uniform, objective way, task force members said.

Their recommendations appear in a report appearing Monday in the May edition of Chest, the medical journal of the American College of Chest Physicians.

“If a mass casualty critical care event were to occur tomorrow, many people with clinical conditions that are survivable under usual health care system conditions may have to forgo life-sustaining interventions owing to deficiencies in supply or staffing,” the report states.

To prepare, hospitals should designate a triage team with the Godlike task of deciding who will and who won’t get lifesaving care, the task force wrote. Those out of luck are the people at high risk of death and a slim chance of long-term survival. But the recommendations get much more specific, and include:

_People older than 85.

_Those with severe trauma, which could include critical injuries from car crashes and shootings.

_Severely burned patients older than 60.

_Those with severe mental impairment, which could include advanced Alzheimer’s disease.

_Those with a severe chronic disease, such as advanced heart failure, lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes.

Dr. Kevin Yeskey, director of the preparedness and emergency operations office at the Department of Health and Human Services, was on the task force. He said the report would be among many the agency reviews as part of preparedness efforts.

Public health law expert Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University called the report an important initiative but also “a political minefield and a legal minefield.”

The recommendations would probably violate federal laws against age discrimination and disability discrimination, said Gostin, who was not on the task force.

If followed to a tee, such rules could exclude care for the poorest, most disadvantaged citizens who suffer disproportionately from chronic disease and disability, he said. While health care rationing will be necessary in a mass disaster, “there are some real ethical concerns here.”

James Bentley, a senior vice president at American Hospital Association, said the report will give guidance to hospitals in shaping their own preparedness plans even if they don’t follow all the suggestions.

He said the proposals resemble a battlefield approach in which limited health care resources are reserved for those most likely to survive.
Bentley said it’s not the first time this type of approach has been recommended for a catastrophic pandemic, but that “this is the most detailed one I have seen from a professional group.”

While the notion of rationing health care is unpleasant, the report could help the public understand that it will be necessary, Bentley said.
Devereaux said compiling the list “was emotionally difficult for everyone.”
That’s partly because members believe it’s just a matter of time before such a health care disaster hits, she said.

“You never know,” Devereaux said. “SARS took a lot of folks by surprise. We didn’t even know it existed.”

The state’s juvenile prisons, group homes for the disabled, and state schools for people with mental disabilities all came under fire last year for reports of widespread physical and sexual abuse.

Dallas Morning News | May 4, 2008

By EMILY RAMSHAW

AUSTIN – Patients with severe mental illness are committed to Texas’ state psychiatric hospitals to be protected from themselves. Instead, some are suffering vicious abuse from the very caregivers hired to look after them.

And dozens more have participated in brutal beatings at the psychiatric hospitals since 2005, employee disciplinary reports show – using chokeholds, headlocks and threats of violence to restrain the patients under their watch.

In all, 72 employees across Texas’ 10 state mental hospitals have been fired in the last three years for allegations of physical abuse, according to a Dallas Morning News analysis of state personnel records. Hundreds more have been terminated for other violations, the records show, from sleeping on the job to over-medicating mentally ill patients.

State officials say there will always be some reports of abuse and neglect in an institutional setting. And they say they take any allegations of mistreatment seriously. But the records show that as in other state-run facilities, abuse and neglect are systemic.

The state’s juvenile prisons, group homes for the disabled, and state schools for people with mental disabilities all came under fire last year for reports of widespread physical and sexual abuse. The state psychiatric hospitals, like other systems for vulnerable Texans, are chronically starved for cash, advocates of more state funding say, and services at the local level can’t keep up.

“You get what you pay for,” said Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, who has bipolar disorder. “When you financially dumb something down, you make services cheap, something’s got to give. Unfortunately, it usually ends up being a mentally ill or disabled Texan.”

Officials with the Department of State Health Services, the agency that runs the psychiatric hospitals, say abuse and neglect are “absolutely not” pervasive – and verified cases are actually dropping.

In the last two years, they confirmed 15 “Class I” cases – the most serious abuse. On average, investigators substantiate 5 percent of the more than 2,000 allegations they examine annually. And 90 percent of patient deaths since 2005 were attributed to natural causes, agency spokesman Doug McBride said. Five were suicides, and none were the result of abuse.

“Keep in mind there are about 7,400 employees, 18,000 patient admissions and probably hundreds of thousands of staff-patient interactions in a year,” Mr. McBride said.

State officials acknowledge that the psychiatric hospitals are stressful environments; there are times, Mr. McBride said, when employees “do not handle a situation appropriately.” But they say the rules for reporting abuse and neglect are stringent – and confirmed cases of physical and sexual abuse are reported to police.

And they balk at the suggestion that conditions bear a resemblance to the state schools for people with mental disabilities, where the U.S. Justice Department has intervened twice in recent years.

The state psychiatric hospitals, which have about 2,500 patients daily, had 137 confirmed abuse cases in 2007. The state schools for people with disabilities, which have twice as many residents, have an average of 300 confirmed abuse cases per year.

But some advocates fear the mentally ill patients may face greater risks. Patients of the psychiatric hospitals are largely indigent, transient and not connected to their families, so they have few allies as they bounce through the mental health system.

“It’s a population that’s easy to abuse because they’re not on the radar in any way,” said Richard Hansen, a Texas mental health advocate who was chemically restrained, shackled and beaten to the point of broken ribs years ago while suffering from bipolar disorder in a New York mental hospital.

But there are few alternatives, advocates say, because smaller community-based services are as strapped as the state system.

Full Story

Science Daily | Apr 29, 2008

Scientists at the department of Applied Physics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have discovered a method for remote sensing of the physiological and emotional state of human beings.

The researchers believe the discovery could theoretically help remotely monitor medical patients, evaluate athletic performance, diagnose disease and remotely sense the level of excitation – which could have significant implications for technology in the biomedical engineering, anti-terror and security technology fields.

The key is in the surprising shape of human sweat ducts. Professors Yuri Feldman and Aharon Agranat together with Dr. Alexander Puzenko, Dr. Andreas Caduff and PhD student Paul Ben-Ishai have discovered that the human skin is structured as an array of minute antennas that operate in the “Sub Terahertz” frequency range.

This discovery is based on investigations of the internal layers of the skin that were undertaken using a new imaging technique called “Optical Coherent Tomography”. Images produced by this technique revealed that the sweat ducts, which are the tubes that lead the sweat from the sweat gland to the surface of the skin, are shaped as tiny coils. Similar helical structures with much larger dimensions have been used widely in as antennas in wireless communication systems. This made the investigators consider the possibility that the sweat ducts could behave like tiny helical antennas as well.

In a series of experiments, the team measured the electromagnetic radiation reflected from the palm skin at the frequency range between 75GHz and 110GHz. It was found that the level of the reflected intensity depends strongly on the level of activity of the perspiration system. In particular, it was found that the reflected signal is very different if measured in a subject that was relaxed, and if measured in a subject following intense physical activity.

In a second set of measurements it was found that during the period of return to the relaxed state, the reflected signal was strongly correlated with changes in the blood pressure and the pulse rate that were measured simultaneously.

The initial results of the research were published last week in the prestigious scientific journal The Physical Review Letters. The publication aroused significant interest among scientists, physicians and science writers.

The researchers emphasize however, that the research is still in its initial stages and as they “sail in unsheltered water” it will take some time before the full significance of the research is understood and its technological potential is fully evaluated.

The invention has been patented and commercialized by Yissum, the technology transfer company of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The medications have side effects which accelerate mental decline, triple the risk of stroke, and double the chances of premature death.

Telegraph | Apr 28, 2008

Ministers should step in to stop inappropriate prescriptions of powerful antipsychotic drugs for Alzheimer’s patients, an influential group of MPs said today.

Up to 105,000 people with dementia in Britain are wrongly being treated with the drugs, which are used to control behavioural symptoms such as aggression, they claim. Research has shown that the medications have side effects which can accelerate mental decline, triple the risk of stroke, and double the chances of premature death.

They are intended for psychotic patients suffering from delusions, paranoia and hallucinations. Yet the drugs continue to be used as a first resort to address the challenging behaviour of people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia, according to the MPs. A report from the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on dementia demanded Government action on the problem and urged the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), the health watchdog, to carry out a review.

The report, A Last Resort, points out that no audit or regulation of such prescriptions exists. Jeremy Wright, the group’s chairman, said: “Antipsychotics can double risk of death and triple the risk of stroke in people with dementia, (can) heavily sedate them, and (can) accelerate cognitive decline.

“The Government must end this needless abuse. Safeguards must be put in place to ensure antipsychotics are always a last resort. We need to include families in decisions, give people with dementia regular reviews, and equip care staff with specialist training.”

The inquiry was told that 150,000 people with dementia were prescribed antipsychotic drugs in British care facilities. Psychiatric experts said 70 per cent of these prescriptions were inappropriate.

Neil Hunt, the chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Society, said more than 70 per cent of dementia patients exhibited challenging behaviour.

“More often than not this is an expression of unmet need, not a symptom of dementia, and there is no excuse for reaching for the medicine cabinet,” he said.

‘This isn’t conjecture, it’s happening now’

WorldNetDaily | Apr 19, 2008

By Bob Unruh

A doctor at the renowned Children’s Hospital Boston has launched a new program to drug children to delay puberty so they can decide whether they want a male or a female body, according to a report today in the Boston Globe.

Pediatric endocrinologist Norman Spack, 64, says he started the Gender Management Service Clinic because he found himself encountering 20-somethings who were “transgendered” and in good shape socially, “but they were having trouble getting their physique to conform to their identity.

“I knew the 20-somethings could have better chances of passing if they were treated earlier,” he said.

“We don’t think that demonic is too strong a word to describe this,” said a statement from the pro-family Mass Resistance organization. “It brings us thoughts of the Nazi doctors who thought they were doing good things.”

WND has reported previously on some of the controversies prompted by the belief that a man can be born in a woman’s body, or vice versa, including in Montgomery County, Md., where county officials have adopted a law that precludes those who provide public accommodations from discriminating based on that “gender identity.”

Voters there have petitioned to have a vote on that law because they fear men who “decide” they are female walking into women’s restrooms and locker rooms.

“Is this our future?” asked Mass Resistance in a commentary. “Dr. Norman Spack runs a clinic for young children who’ve ‘decided’ they are transgendered. Among other things, the clinic administers powerful hormones to delay (or even stop) puberty in order that the children more easily undergo operations that mutilate their bodies to ‘change’ them to the opposite sex.”

“This is going on at the world-renowned Children’s Hospital in Boston – not some backwater clinic. This is the elite of the medical profession,” the organization said.

In a question-and-answer session with Globe columnist Pagan Kennedy, she starts the apologetic for doing surgery on children by saying, “Little boys sob unless they’re allowed to wear dresses. The girls want to be called Luke, Ted, or James.”

“Until recently, children with cross-gender feelings rarely received modern medical care – and certainly not hormone shots. After all, who would allow a child to redesign his or her body?” she asks.

But Spack, she wrote, has started a clinic that “is one of the few in the world to give children treatments that change their bodies.”

She reports he uses drugs to delay puberty, “granting them a few more years before they develop bodies that are decidedly male or female.”

Spack tells the interviewer he’s seen “preadolescents” who have been dressing in underwear of the opposite sex “for years.”

“The puberty-blocking drugs work best at the beginning of the pubital process, typically age 10 to 12 for a girl and 12 to 14 for a boy,” he said. He’s based some of his work on a Dutch model for sex-change, and said the recommendations there are age 16 for hormones that forever change a child’s body.

But “for others,” he wrote, “you lose opportunities if you wait. [One of my patients, a] transgendered girl from the UK, was destined to be a 6-foot-4 male. With treatment, she’s going to end up 5-foot-10.”

He said such treatments not only change the physical characteristics of the growing children, but also could leave them sterile for life.

“You have to explain to the patients that if they go ahead, they may not be able to have children. … But if you don’t start treatment, they will always have trouble fitting in,” he said.

“This isn’t conjecture,” Mass Resistance’ commentary said. “It’s happening now. And ‘transgenderism’ is being promoted to kids by homosexual/transgender activists in the public schools.”

Children as young as 12 already have been given the treatment.

Meanwhile, LifeSiteNews has reported that Spack previously acknowledged that only about 20 percent of children who claim to have a confusion over their gender hold those feelings in adulthood.

The hospital itself calls the program “unique in the Western hemisphere.”

“This will be the first major program in the country that … [is] also welcoming young people who appear to be transgendered and are considering medical protocols that might help them,” Spack said.

Independent | Apr 17, 2008

By Rachel Shields

The Australian government has launched an investigation into claims that aboriginal children seized from their parents during the 1920s and 1930s were secretly used as guinea pigs for leprosy treatments.

The allegations surfaced at a Senate inquiry this week into plans to compensate the “stolen generation” of aboriginal Australians who were taken from their families as part of a government programme.

“As well as being taken away, they were used… There are a lot of things that Australia does not know about,” Kathleen Mills, a member of the Stolen Generations Alliance and an indigenous elder, told the hearing.

Ms Mills said children held at a compound in Darwin were injected with serums designed to be used in the treatment of leprosy – a practice which seriously damaged their health. Her uncle, who worked there as a medical orderly, had told her about the sinister goings-on.

“He said it made our people very, very ill. The treatment almost killed them,” she told reporters outside the hearing. “It was a common experience and a common practice.”

Australia’s Health Minister, Nicola Roxon, yesterday ordered an investigation into the accusations, asking that the State Health Department and the Department of Indigenous Affairs comb their archives for any evidence of such abuses. “These are obviously very serious allegations and we will do everything we can to ascertain the facts of the situation,” she said.

Between the late 19th century and the late 1960s, 100,000 aboriginal children were victims of a government policy that saw them taken from their homes and placed with white families, or in orphanages. The latest claims of abuse come just two months after the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, offered a historic apology to the children of the “stolen generation”, condemning the period as “a blemished chapter of ournation’s history”.

While the Prime Minister may have apologised for “the indignity and degradation” inflicted on the aboriginal community, his refusal to offer compensation has led many indigenous leaders to dismiss the move as a”cut-price sorry”.

Australia’s 450,000 aborigines are the country’s most disadvantaged social group, with a life expectancy 17 years lower than their white counterparts. They are three times more likely to be unemployed, and 13 times more likely to be imprisoned.

An infectious disease specialist from Sydney University has questioned the claims that aboriginal children were subject to unusual or inhumane practices.

Warwick Britton told ABC radio that in the 1920s and 1930s, leprosy sufferers were treated with chaulmoogra oil, which was painful when injected. “It is possible that this has been misunderstood as some kind of guinea pig therapy when in fact it was a treatment that was being used around the world,” he said.

AP | Mar 12, 2008

By MARIA CHENG

LONDON - As doctors struggle to eradicate polio worldwide, one of their biggest problems is persuading parents to vaccinate their children. In Belgium, authorities are resorting to an extreme measure: prison sentences.

Two sets of parents in Belgium were recently handed five month prison terms for failing to vaccinate their children against polio. Each parent was also fined 4,100 euros ($8,000).

“It’s a pretty extraordinary case,” said Dr. Ross Upshur, director of the Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto.

“The Belgians have a right to take some action against the parents, given the seriousness of polio, but the question is, is a prison sentence disproportionate?”

The parents can still avoid prison — their sentences were delayed to give them a chance to vaccinate their children. But if that deadline also passes without their children receiving the injections, the parents could be put behind bars.

Because of privacy laws, Belgian officials would not talk specifically about the case, such as why the parents refused the vaccine or how much longer they have to vaccinate their children.

The polio vaccine is the only one required by Belgian law. Exceptions are granted only if parents can prove their children might have a bad physical reaction to the vaccine.

“Polio is a very serious disease and has caused great suffering in the past,” said Dr. Victor Lusayu, head of Belgium’s international vaccine centre. “The discovery of the vaccine has eliminated polio from Europe and it is simply the law in Belgium that you have to be vaccinated. … At the end of the day, the law must be respected.”

Some ethicists back the hardline Belgian stance.

“Nobody has the right to unfettered liberty, and people do not have a right to endanger their kids,” said John Harris, a professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester.

“The parents in this case do not have any rights they can appeal to. They have obligations they are not fulfilling.”

Aside from Belgium, only France makes polio vaccinations mandatory by law. In the United States, children must be vaccinated against many diseases including polio, but most states allow children to opt out if their parents have religious or “philosophical” objections.

In the U.S. state of Maryland, prosecutors and school officials in one county threatened truancy charges against parents who failed to vaccinate their children. The measure sharply reduced the number of unvaccinated children although nobody has been charged.

The only other case of mandatory polio vaccines is during the Muslim yearly Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia. Pilgrims from polio-endemic countries — Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan — must prove they have been vaccinated. Saudi officials even give them an extra dose upon arrival at the airport.

Since the polio virus can live in the human body for weeks, it jumps borders easily. That makes health officials even in developed countries nervous, since the threat of an outbreak remains as long as the virus is circulating anywhere.

Polio is a highly infectious disease spread through water that mainly strikes children under five. Initial symptoms include fever, headaches, vomiting, stiffness in the neck and fatigue. The polio virus invades the body’s nervous system and can lead to irreversible paralysis within hours. In extreme cases, children can die when their breathing muscles are immobilized.

Incidence has dropped by 99 percent since the World Health Organization and partners began their eradication effort in 1988. But the virus is still entrenched in Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan, and occasionally pops up elsewhere.

For developed countries, imported polio cases could cause chaos in the health system, warned Dr. Steve Cochi, an immunization expert at the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

He said that unlike other medical problems, in which rejecting treatment only affects the individual, refusing a vaccine for a transmissible disease like polio puts others at risk as well.

“Most of the time, polio outbreaks do spill into the general population,” Cochi said.

Ethicists argue that people who refuse vaccinations are taking advantage of everyone else who has been vaccinated. Once the majority of a population is vaccinated, there are few susceptible people the disease can infect, thus lowering the odds of an outbreak.

People who refuse to be vaccinated are “free riders,” Harris said. “They can only afford to refuse the vaccine because they are surrounded by people who have fulfilled their obligations to the community.”

Health officials doubt that Belgium’s strategy will be useful to countries still battling polio.

“It is up to individual countries to decide their own policies, but we do not feel that imprisonment would help,” said Dr. David Heymann, WHO’s top polio official.

Independent | Jan 29, 2008

By Andrew Buncombe in Delhi

Police at India’s airports are on the alert for a doctor accused of masterminding an illegal organ transplant ring that harvested more than 500 kidneys from itinerant labourers for wealthy patients. Some donors say they were tricked into taking part and forced at gunpoint to have the operation.

Working from a house in a city near Delhi, the doctor is said to have taken kidneys from hundreds of labourers in the past nine years and transplanted them to high-paying recipients, many from overseas. Neighbours said they wondered what was happening when they saw blood running out of the gutters. Reports say transplant recipients paid up to £300,000 while the people who sold their organs received £625 if they were paid at all.

The perpetrators are said to have used a car fitted with medical equipment which travelled around the region and performed blood tests on prospective donors. If a match was found, the donor was offered a deal on the spot.

Last week police raided the three-storey house in the city of Gurgaon, one of India’s new IT and business centres, from which they say the ring operated. A doctor, his driver and three others described as “middlemen” were arrested while police also discovered five donors – three of whom had already undergone an operation and were recovering. They also discovered five patients, three non-resident Indians from the US and two Greek citizens, awaiting transplants.

But police have not found the man they believe was at the centre of the operation, a doctor called Amit Kumar who used an alias, Santosh Rameshwar Raut. Reports say Mr Kumar – using his alias – had been charged by police in Mumbai over a similar organ transplant racket in the early 1990s.

Local media reported that labourers who accepted offers of £2-a-day construction jobs in Gurgaon were taken to house where armed guards injected them with sedatives. When they woke up they were told that they had undergone an operation. Mohammad Shakeel, 28, told the Hindustan Times. “I woke up with a terrible pain behind my stomach. ‘Listen we have just taken one of your kidneys. You will live normally. Tell this to anyone and we will kill you,’ said a masked man.”

Police believe Mr Kumar may have travelled to Nepal and say they have uncovered six other properties in Gurgaon from which the scheme operated.

Detectives say that up to 20 nurses may also have been involved and that several hospitals in Delhi may have played a role, albeit unwittingly, by conducting pathology tests.

Last year, police in south India said they had uncovered evidence of illegal trade in kidneys sold by fishermen whose livelihoods were destroyed by the Indian Ocean tsunami.

AP | Jan 16, 2008

NEW YORK - A construction worker claimed in a lawsuit that when he went to a hospital after being hit on the forehead by a falling wooden beam, emergency room staffers forcibly gave him a rectal examination.

Brian Persaud, 38, says in court papers that after he denied a request by NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital emergency room employees to examine his rectum, he was “assaulted, battered and falsely imprisoned.”

His lawyer, Gerrard M. Marrone, said he and Persaud later learned the exam was one way of determining whether he had suffered spinal damage in the accident.

Marrone said his client got eight stitches for a cut over his eyebrow.

Then, Marrone said, emergency room staffers insisted on examining his rectum and held him down while he begged, “Please don’t do that.” He said Persaud hit a doctor while flailing around and staffers gave him an injection, which knocked him out, and performed the rectal exam.

Persaud woke up handcuffed to a bed and with an oxygen tube down his throat, the lawyer said, and spent three days in a detention center.

A request by the hospital to dismiss Persaud’s lawsuit was denied by Justice Alice Schlesinger, who ordered a trial to start March 31.

Hospital spokesman Bryan Dotson said, “While it would be inappropriate for us to comment on specifics of the case, we believe it is completely without merit and intend to contest it vigorously.”

Persaud’s lawsuit, filed in Manhattan’s state Supreme Court, seeks unspecified damages. A judge dismissed a misdemeanor assault charge against him.