The $17 million lawsuit against the Orgon Health and Science University for a wrong heart surgery on a 13-year-old girl gave fodder to the anti-India narrative on social media as the doctor who performed the surgery was Dr Ashok Muralidaran, an Indian-origin pediatric cardiac surgeon.
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Steven and Lori Stokes filed a $17 million lawsuit against OHSU and Dr Ashok Muralidaran, who performed the surgery, in Multnomah County Circuit Court, alleging negligence in medical care. On August 15, 2025, an OHSU surgical team led by Dr Muralidharan performed an open-heart surgery on a 13-year-old girl to implant a heart valve. The procedure required surgeons to stop her heart while she was on cardiac bypass but after the surgery, the doctors were unable to get her heart restarted, the lawsuit alleged. She was placed on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, a system that mechanically pumps blood through a heart-lung machine, which reoxygenates it and circulates it back into the body.
The parents alleged that the doctors told them that their surgery went very well and that her heart was likely not working correctly because of the shock of surgery. They said ECMO would gradually restart her heart but that did not happen.
