An Ohio plastic surgeon known on TikTok as “Dr. Roxy” had her medical license permanently revoked after livestreaming procedures and effectively harming her patients in the process.
The Ohio Medical Board voted Wednesday to ban Dr. Katharine Roxanne Grawe from ever practicing medicine again in the state.
The board said Grawe, who originally had her license suspended in November, neglected her patients as she livestreamed parts of their procedures, spoke into a camera and answered viewer questions — all while the surgeries were taking place at her clinic, Roxy Plastic Surgery in Powell, Ohio, a city north of Columbus.
Grawe’s TikTok account is currently private, as is her Instagram account, which still had more than 118,000 followers as of Thursday.
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The board warned Grawe about her actions as early as 2018, citing concerns over patient privacy and possible ethics violations, according to a previous board suspension notice.
The notice also listed three patients of Grawe’s who suffered severe complications and needed intense medical care after she operated on them. One woman’s intestine was found to be perforated a week after her surgery, a procedure that Grawe partially livestreamed on TikTok.
The unnamed patient suffered severe damage to and bacterial infections in her abdomen, as well as loss of brain function from the amount of toxins in her blood, according to the notice.
A spokeswoman for the state medical board told the New York Times Grawe has 15 days after the board’s order is mailed to appeal the decision.
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At the hearing, Grawe told the medical board she made the videos because she loved teaching about plastic surgery but recognized she had “fallen below the board’s ideal in multiple ways” and that many of the videos shared to the platform “appeared silly and unprofessional.”
She also reportedly told the board that her husband had left her amid the stress of the controversy, her children were being harassed at school, and she had to fire 20 clinic employees.
The board had warned her twice, in letters sent in October 2018 and September 2021, that she needed to uphold patient privacy on social media.
The second letter instructed Grawe to undergo remedial courses about professionalism and ethics, and Grawe claimed she completed those social media ethics classes in December 2021. Despite this, the now former doctor continued to post videos of plastic surgeries, including Brazilian butt lifts, through October 2022.