Med Students + Cell Phone Cameras + Cadavers. Guess What Happens Next?

Maybe if you're real lucky, this stethoscope freak - Aaron Hartman - is YOUR doctor

And so it seems that a senior orthodontics professor, along with a few graduate dental school students at Yale University, decided to have a little off-beat fun behind closed doors. They thought it would be kinda cool to start snapping selfies in the lab, posing with the severed heads of folks who had donated their bodies to the advancement of science.

When it comes to antics in medicine, you can guess how it is. Boys will be boys.

Investigators learned the photos were taken last June at the Yale School of Medicine during a workshop called the DePuy Synthes Future Leaders, which focused on dental-related facial malformations.

Those in the photo include Doctor Flavio Uribe, a program director at UConn Health and associate professor at the Yale. In the picture, Uribe and several graduate students are looking at the camera. The two decapitated heads are posed on lab tables.

An unnamed student sent at least one photo to the Associated Press and said it was distributed online in a private chat group.

When Doctor Uribe was questioned by school administration, he explained that he was teaching students how to place screws in the cadaver heads on that afternoon and "someone took a photo."

Yale officials say they are taking steps to ensure unauthorized photo-taking does not happen in the future. They say they are improving oversight at such training events and making participants agree in writing to ethical standards of conduct.

Christopher Hyers, UConn Health chief communications officer, said that, “we were made aware of the incident and took appropriate internal steps.”

Doctor Lawrence Rizzolo, Director of Medical Studies, called the incident “an egregious violation of policy."

Here at the Paramedic Heretic we've revealed for years that medical students and doctors taking outrageous photos is nothing new. Medical schools and hospitals nationwide have had to implement social media policies, about what may, and may not, be posted online. But it happens all the time anyway.

In 2010, a physician at Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York put up a Facebook photo showing a former classmate giving a thumbs up next to a cadaver. No punishment of course. (See photo above)

Last year, a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center hospital in Bedford, Pennsylvania, was cited for numerous violations, after staff took photos and videos of a female patient being treated for a foreign object lodged in her genitals. One physician was suspended for 4 weeks and another was suspended for a week.

And then of course we wrote last week about the appalling Joan Rivers case.

Like we say: The Twilight Zone.