Surgical personnel from across the country are putting their personal and professional lives on hold to provide relief after the magnitude 7 earthquake rocked Haiti on Jan. 12. Here are just a few examples:

Kristen Diane Parker, the surgical tech whose drug theft and tampering infected patients at 2 Colorado surgical facilities with hepatitis C, is reconsidering her legal options after a federal judge nixed the plea agreement she'd made with prosecutors.

Ms. Parker was scheduled to be sentenced to 20 years in prison in a Denver courtroom on Friday. But at that hearing, U.S. District Judge Robert E. Blackburn said the agreement restricted his latitude in sentencing and failed to address the victims who argued 20 years wasn't long enough.

This announcement left Ms. Parker to decide whether to accept a potentially longer sentence, renegotiate with prosecutors or withdraw her guilty plea and go to trial. Her next hearing has been scheduled for Feb. 5.

Ms. Parker, 27, pleaded guilty in September to tampering with a consumer product and obtaining a controlled substance by deceit or subterfuge. She'd been accused of stealing and injecting herself with fentanyl, swapping out the syringes for used, saline-filled ones.

While patients at the Rose Medical Center in Denver and the Audubon Surgery Center in Colorado Springs were found to have been infected by Ms. Parker's thefts, investigators have linked no cases of hepatitis C to the Mount Kisco, N.Y., and Houston facilities which previously employed her.

David Bernard

A new study shows a substantial overuse of surveillance colonoscopy among patients at low risk of colorectal cancer and an underuse of follow-up screenings among patients at higher risk.

Researchers led by Robert Schoen, MD, of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, retrospectively surveyed 3,627 participants in a cancer screening trial and published their findings in the January issue of the journal Gastroenterology.

Only 58.4% of patients whose initial diagnostic colonoscopies revealed advanced adenomas received a follow-up colonoscopy within 5 years as recommended. Meanwhile, the average time between the initial diagnostic colonoscopy and a follow-up among 1,029 patients whose initial exams showed no precancerous colorectal growths was 3.9 years, much sooner than the recommended 5 to 10 years. Researchers found no documented medical evidence to justify the early follow-ups. "This misuse wastes healthcare resources and risks development of cancers in high-risk patients that might have been preventable," writes Dr. Schoen in a statement.

In a related commentary, John I. Allen, MD, of the University of Minnesota School of Medicine suggests several possible reasons for the "misuse" of endoscopy, including unclear scientific guidelines, primary care physicians ordering tests without consulting endoscopists, inefficient recordkeeping and a fee-for-service system that encourages overuse. He proposes the development of a patient outcome registry and a shift to value-based payments for colorectal cancer screenings.

Irene Tsikitas

Register your vote in this week's InstaPoll for the one procedure you'd most like to add to your case mix: retina, spine, bariatrics, pain management or endoscopic sinus surgery. We'll report the results in this space next week.

Slightly more than half of last week's respondents use consciousness monitors to measure the depth of anesthesia, with 31% saying every patient is monitored and 23% saying some are. The other 46% of our 83 respondents say they never use brain wave monitors.

Dan O'Connor