In what can only be described as a pathetic attempt to justify what was at best gross medical negligence and unethical behavior, and at worst chemical incapacitation for the purpose of committing serial rape, Dr. Jon Norberg, 41, of Fargo N.D. went on camera Friday, days after pleading guilty to lesser charges of felony reckless endangerment and misdemeanor sexual imposition.

If the public learned anything  about propofol  from the Michael Jackson case , it is the fact that it should NEVER be administered in someone’s home under ANY circumstances, and that it is a very dangerous drug in untrained hands. The good Dr. Norberg would have us believe that  he is somehow qualified and even experienced in the administration of propofol and that a reasonable physician might inject his wife with it over and over to treat an illness. There is not an ounce of truth in this. Not an ounce.  

Here is a clip from KFGO.com:

 http://lawmedconsultant.com/norberg.flv

Referring to both he and his wife Norberg says “We had both administered propofol in our medical careers. We were both trained on propofol, and we were experienced and comfortable with its use.  Based on our review of medical articles, our training with the medication as doctors, her personal experience as a patient, we decided to try propofol.”  

Let Law Med clear this up for you right now. HE IS FULL OF SHIT.  Orthopedic surgeons NEVER….let’s just repeat that…NEVER..administer propofol as a routine part of their surgical practice. Having graced the halls of many an operating room in many a hospital be they small community 2 OR facilities or 24 OR large academic university affiliated medical centers, not once in the last 2 decades has Law Med ever seen an orthopedic surgeon so much as pick up a propofol syringe for ANY purpose. 

His entire statement is complete nonsense. IF Norberg has ever ONCE administered propofol in his medical practice it was by virtue of some odd circumstance. In all likelihood he in fact has NEVER administered the drug and somehow has convinced himself that being in the room to do a procedure on someone who has been given propofol by an anesthesia professional equates to having ” administered propofol in our medical careers”. I defy him to produce any valid or meaningful training he completed on the administration of propofol. It never happened. Send us the documentation Dr. Norberg and we will happily print it on our front page…we will even dedicate a special page on the blog to it and proclaim our journalistic incompetence.  

His most disconcerting statement is “we were experienced and comfortable with its use”. Any physician in his specialty who seriously claims this regarding propofol is a danger to patients, deluded about their abilities and a risk to the safety of those they treat.  

Then we have the statement a physician untrained in a technique or therapy predictably uses to try an claim otherwise: my review of medical journals taught me what I needed to know. You cannot learn propofol administration from reading articles or books. It is an art within the practice of anesthesia which requires years of supervised training. Yet Norberg says “Based on our review of medical articles, our training with the medication as doctors, and her personal experience as a patient , we decided to try propofol.”

To be very clear, Norberg’s claims of training with propofol are false and/or mischaracterized as significant. Review of “medical articles” is neither her nor there…such activity is irrelevant. Alonna Norberg’s “personal experience” with propofol was for entirely different purposes, various medical or surgical procedures. He claimed that she felt better for “days afterward”. Even if this were true, she would have received any number of medications at the same time, including narcotics, and the claim that propofol was somehow responsible for successful treatment of her chronic pain is malarkey. In his intense review of “medical articles” Norberg should have quickly come to the conclusion that propofol has no proven application in the treatment of chronic pain. It is NOT a drug used to treat any type of pain acute OR chronic… PERIOD. Had he selected ketamine, another drug in the anesthesia arsenal which is used for sedation and general anesthesia to incapacitate his wife, he would have had a plausible defense since that drug IS known for its ability to diminish chronic pain where other treatments have failed. It is also far safer in untrained hands as it does not suppress respiratory effort as easily even at anesthetic doses. So we are left with the question, why propofol? It was a dangerous choice with no reasonable expectation it could produce results.

The North Dakota Board of Medical Examiners indefinitely suspended the license of Dr. Norberg on Thursday and in doing so found that Norberg wasn’t qualified or recognized by his employer, Sanford Health, or Essentia Health, where he had privilege to practice, to administer propofol. His own hospital would never permit him to administer propofol to a patient because he lacked the qualifications to do so. 

 Only anesthesia professionals like anesthesiologists and Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists receive the required intensive training in the administration of propofol for sedation and general anesthesia. Some institutions advocate for special training of non-anesthesia nurses and doctors in the administration of propofol for light sedation of patients undergoing procedures like colonoscopy. Norberg alludes to this type of propofol administration when he claims that he had the required monitors at home. This would have included blood pressure, EKG and pusle oxymetry machines. We are aware of no evidence which shows these monitors were in use.

What’s almost as bad is that Norberg, as a physician, KNOWS his explanations are nonsense, especially to knowledgable professionals in the medical community who will hear them. But he simply does not care. He is trying to salvage something to support his arguments in his pending divorce, which after his conviction seems less and less likely. And after all no one would relish the thought of the public and the national media forming an opinion of them that rivals those reserved for the most despicable amongst us. At this point he has nothing to lose by telling these lies publically. His medical license is suspended and his criminal case is over. It is no coincidence that his statements are made for the first time the day after these two events conclude.

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