Celebs in the ER Add to Pressure on Docs

June 3, 2008 — -- For doctors operating on high-profile patients like Sen. Ted Kennedy, an ability to ignore the hype and focus on the surgery at hand could mean the difference between life and death, doctors say.

"[Patients] all look the same on the inside," said New York-based cardiologist Dr. Wayne Isom, who performed Regis Philbin's triple bypass surgery in 2007. "And it's when doctors start trying to treat someone differently because of who they are that gets them into trouble."

Kennedy became the latest public figure to go under the knife when doctors at the Duke University Medical Center operated Monday on a malignant brain tumor discovered after the senator suffered a seizure last month.

Duke's Dr. Allen Freidman, who operated on the Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement shortly after the three-and-a-half hour surgery that the procedure had been successful.

Like Kennedy, 76, many celebrity patients have taken their turn on the operating table, from Vice President Dick Cheney, who has had multiple heart surgeries, to former President Bill Clinton, who had quadruple bypass surgery in 2004, to NBC's late night talk show host David Letterman, who had quintuple bypass surgery in 2000. They've all had to trust their doctor's steady hand under the limelight of fame.

Remembering that celebrity patients are no different from more typical ones is imperative to a successful outcome, several surgeons and doctors told ABCNEWS.com.

Docs Say: Celebrity, What Celebrity?

"From the standpoint of medicine and surgery you don't change anything [when treating a celebrity client]," said New York-Presbyterian Hospital's Isom. "If you get carried away with the media — and some doctors do — you're getting away from what you're trying to do."

Isom, who has treated other high-profile patients such as "The Tonight Show's" Jack Parr, compared performing an operation to flying an airplane.

"When you're approaching the landing as a pilot you're not thinking about anything, like who is [in the passenger seat]," Isom said. "All you're focusing on is landing the plane. Surgery is like a sterile cockpit; nothing is going on other than you and the co-pilot landing a plane."

Dr. William Knaus was the attending physician in the intensive care unit at George Washington University Hospital in March 1981 when then-President Ronald Reagan arrived after being shot by John Hinkley outside the Washington Hilton.

And while it was certainly a procedure filled with adrenaline and nerves, Knaus, now the chairman of the Department of Health Evaluation Sciences at the University of Virginia Health System, told ABCNEWS.com that it was the physicians' ability to stick close to the script that may have saved Reagan's life.

"When it was time to put the intravenous drugs into President Reagan we had the people who do it all the time do it," Knaus said. "We didn't' have the top doctor do it because he probably hadn't had to do it for a while."

"The emergency room nurses stripped the president of all his clothes when he arrived, something we do to all trauma victims. And that's how they found the entry wound," Knaus said of the bullet injury that had penetrated Reagan's left chest, just missing his heart. "We might not have seen [the wound] as quickly if the nurses had modified what they do because he was a [high-profile] patient."

A Disease Is a Disease, No Matter Whom It Infects

For Dr. Amin Kassam, the chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, years of experience treating high-profile patients has trained him to juggle fighting off the media while also fighting a cancerous tumor.

"I'm extremely sensitive to making sure the patient and the family's interests are protected above everything else," said Kassam, who treated the late mayor of Pittsburgh Bob O'Connor, who died from lymphoma in 2006. "The last thing a family who is suffering with an illness needs is scrutiny. They need to focus on getting the patient better."

Kassam and several other doctors told ABCNEWS.com that they will disseminate information to the media for high-profile clients as they are instructed, and are more than willing to communicate through the media as long as the patient approves.

And while Kassam said his first few times operating on celebrity patients made him feel like he was "operating in a fishbowl," today the hardest part about his job is realizing that he only has so much control over a patient's health, celebrity or otherwise.

"All patients and families want everything done but the expectations should not change because of who the patient is," Kassam said.

"The tumor doesn't realize it has affected someone who is high-profile and visible versus someone who isn't," Kassam added. "I can't change the way the tumor is going to behave and I have to be conscious of that."