Australian mum with deadly brain tumour ignores Charlie Teo critics for risky surgery in China
An Australian mum of six with a deadly brain tumour has ignored critics and followed her gut, travelling to China for surgery with “banished” neurosurgeon Charlie Teo.
NSW
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An Australian mother of six diagnosed with the deadliest brain tumour of all has ignored naysayers and travelled to China to undergo surgery with “banished” neurosurgeon Dr Charlie Teo.
It was the most terrifying decision of Tanya Miles’ life but one that has “paid off”.
The Sunday Telegraph can reveal Dr Teo and his team in Wuzhishan performed a successful radical resection of the Glioblastoma (GBM) tumour - the type of surgery that landed him in strife with Australian medical authorities.
Dr Teo was banned from performing certain surgeries in Australia without written permission in July 2023 after being found guilty of unsatisfactory professional conduct by the Medical Professional Standards Committee.
The decision came in the wake of findings from the Health Care Complaints Commission that Dr Teo decided to operate on two patients where the risk of surgery outweighed the potential benefits and obtaining consents from the patients considered by others to be “too optimistic”.
In an exclusive interview from her hotel room in China just two days after the controversial surgery, Mrs Miles said she was so relieved she listened to her gut and was “angry” she couldn’t have made the same choice in her home country.
She says she now has the best possible chance of spending years, not weeks, with her six children.
“I have seen the post op MRI and there is no contrast (brightness where the tumour shows) just a black hole. I love that black hole.”
Each year 1800 Australians are diagnosed with GBM. Most survive less than 14 months.
Ms Miles, who lives with her husband Damien in Bendigo, ignored “hostility and negativity” from medicos in Victoria when she revealed she was turning her back on chemotherapy and radiation after a more conservative removal of some of the tumour by doctors in Australia.
“They told me they had done a ‘good resection’ but they never really told me what that meant, I wanted percentages. I found out later from the scans there was a lot of the tumour left.”
Ms Miles’ gut told her to look for other options, hence she ventured onto GBM support group pages on Facebook and found a woman who had undergone surgery by Dr Teo in Spain.
“I messaged him and then he called me and once I spoke to him I had just nothing but confidence that this was the right path. The oncologists and doctors in Australia were not happy, they told me he was experimental, all those things they say but I knew my decision was right it was just a no-brainer, an absolute no-brainer.”
When she told her medical team she was going to delay the radiation and heading to China they were “off-ish about it”.
“It was quite obvious they didn’t want me to do it, they called Dr Teo experimental, too risky but I was very confident in my decision from the first time I spoke with Dr Teo.”
“We had a very real and honest chat. He has been accused of giving false hope, well he told me the frank and honest truth. I told him my youngest children are 14 and 16 and they are doing it really tough. He said to me you need to be here when they turn 18 and the best chance you have of doing that is to have a more radical removal.
“He told me I may end up with speech paralysis, my quality of life could be very different.
“I thought yep I want to be able to drive and walk and talk but for my children being here in a lesser capacity is so much more important. So I thought that’s okay whatever that looks like I will adapt. I need to be here”.
Despite being at peace with all the “worst case scenarios” Ms Miles woke from the surgery last Thursday “absolutely terrified”.
“At first I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t feel my arm but I could hear Dr Teo’s voice saying you’re okay and soon after that I could talk, move everything, I was ecstatic.”
Professor Ling Feng described the surgery performed by Dr Teo at the Ling Feng Institute of Neurosciences, Hainan Second People’s Hospital as “very successful, completely removing the original residual GBM, as well as removing an asymptomatic meningioma”.
“Each incision was only 3-4cm long. The patient woke up immediately after surgery, without any symptoms of the nervous system.
“Immediately after returning to the ward, she spoke to her family in Australia via Skype. The family members were in tears.,” Prof Ling said.
“Tanya was discharged from the hospital the next day after surgery, and that night came to my house to enjoy the Chinese New Year and taste Chinese dumplings. The news spread quickly in the neurosurgery community in China, and everyone was amazed.
“I think it’s amazing. All patients wish they could have the same effect if they had surgery. I have been practising medicine for 50 years and have had countless surgical patients, but I have never seen such a craniotomy operation under the general anaesthesia being discharged from hospital within 24 hours.
“I think it has to do with Dr Teo’s superb technique, attention to every detail, and thorough research into the literature. This is particularly worth learning.”
Dr Teo told the Telegraph a GBM is “considered the deadliest of all cancers” but a very small percentage of patients will survive more than five years.
Factors that give you a better chance include being under 60 years of age, the mutation status and the extent of resection.
“It’s a little controversial, but every study shows that the extent of reaction needs to be greater that 95 per cent. It is called an oncological resection because you know upfront that taking a rim of the normal brain from around the tumour will result in some functional problem. “That problem may be so trivial that it’s not discernible, but it might be devastating.”
Dr Teo said that in Ms Miles’ case, she was “willing to trade the potential for mutism, paralysis and worsening vision for the chance of surviving longer”.
“That should be a decision a patient makes, not their surgeon, a multidisciplinary team, or a medical governing body.
“Quite frankly, I don’t blame any neurosurgeon in Australia for not offering an oncological resection after my very public trial in which I was found guilty of “unprofessional behaviour.”
“My only crime was that I offered an oncological resection to two patients who subsequently had very poor outcomes when two expert witnesses said that they would not have offered surgery and if they had they would have quoted a higher risk.
“Both those expert witnesses had never even performed one of the operations presented to the tribunal. That operation is surgery for a brain stem glioma on which I have the largest series in the published, peer-reviewed literature.
“I am extremely confident Tanya would not have been offered a second operation to achieve an oncological resection because it would amount to professional suicide to do so.”
For Ms Miles, the controversy is white noise when faced with a death sentence.
“I hate what Australia has done to Dr Teo and I am scared to think how I will react when I get back home if I hear him criticised,” she said.
“I am just not having it. He gave me a chance to fight. Every Australian should have that chance.”
WORKING ABROAD
It’s been 18 months since the very public Health Care Complaints Commission hearing that resulted in restrictions placed on Dr Teo’s licence because of two terrible surgery outcomes.
What started as a “sad” time of “semi-retirement” soon evolved into a busy year of performing dozens of the high-risk surgeries for which he had been criticised in Australia.
In an interview from Beijing in July last year Professor Ling Feng — Deputy Director of the China International Neuroscience Institute — said she was “not worried” about the restrictions imposed on Dr Teo a year ago for unsatisfactory conduct.
Instead she was thankful for the opportunity to work with him.
Since stopping work in Australia he has performed surgeries in multiple countries apart from China including Spain, Germany Switzerland, South Africa India and Brazil
He has had 183 “excellent outcomes” which means no complications, 25 “good” outcomes with “expected deficit or minor complication”, four considered fair which means “unexpected deficit or major complication” and one death “which records death within 40 days of surgery”.
Dr Teo has performed 38 surgeries on recurrent malignant gliomas of which 34 had excellent outcomes, two had good outcomes, two fair outcomes and zero resulting in death.
**Cydonee Mardon is a former patient of Dr Charlie Teo
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Originally published as Australian mum with deadly brain tumour ignores Charlie Teo critics for risky surgery in China
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