Ellen Britt for CNT #NFT
Although there are tons of perfectly legitimate uses for NFTs and more on the way, a French surgeon recently crossed over to the dark side when he attempted to sell an X-ray of one of his patients as an NFT.
The Guardian reported that Emmanuel Masmejean, a senior orthopedic surgeon at the Georges Pompidou hospital in Paris, offered an NFT on a major platform that consisted of an X-ray image of a woman’s forearm with a bullet lodged near the bone.
The French woman, whose name is being withheld, survived an attack on the Bataclan concert hall in 2015 and was reported to be “extremely shocked” to learn her surgeon was attempting to profit from her injuries. The Bataclan concert hall attack was part of a number of attacks in the French capital and resulted in the loss of 130 lives.
Bad Medicine
The surgeon faces legal consequences as well as disciplinary action, as he never asked permission from the patient to use the image, plus he violated patient-physician confidentiality.
The NFT, which has now been taken down, was offered for a price tag of $2,776.
The takeaway? Make sure you have the rights to the image you want to use to offer as an NFT and also, please don’t violate anyone’s privacy. In this case, looks like the doc got a taste of his own medicine!
