How 7 deaths exposed Damoh’s ‘highly qualified surgeon’ – The Times of India

Dr Narendra John Camm claimed to have trained under the world’s best surgeons in the US and UK. Then, seven of the 13 patients he has operated upon died, exposing a life, career and online persons built entirely on lies

In the two months that he was based at the Mission Hospital at Damoh in Madhya Pradesh, the ‘highly qualified surgeon’ examined nearly 70 patients and performed surgeries on 13 of them.
The surgeon claimed to have trained initially in India and then in the UK and US under multiple specialists. He said he’d performed over 15,000 complex procedures in his three decades as a surgeon.
However, seven of the 13 patients he operated on allegedly died soon after the procedures. Suddenly, there were doubts about the highly paid Dr Narendra John Camm, who had conducted these surgeries.
District president of the Child Welfare Committee Deepak Tiwari told TOI that several families alerted the administration after they noticed discrepancies in the doctor’s qualifications and credentials.
Some patients, who were sceptical of the doctor’s expertise, took their relatives to a different hospital in Jabalpur, where it was discovered that the ‘surgeon’ was impersonating a foreign-trained cardiologist.

In response to concerns raised by the District Collector, an investigation team led by three senior doctors was formed. The team confirmed that several patients had died following surgeries performed by Dr Camm. It also turned out his name was Dr Narendra Vikramaditya Yadav.
But when the investigation team attempted to locate the surgeon, they discovered he had resigned from his post. The hotel room he stayed in during his two-month stint at the hospital was empty.
The highly reputed Dr Camm
On a website, Yadav is said to have studied at the prestigious St. George’s Hospital London and then said he’d received extensive training in Interventional Cardiology under ‘Dr. A John Camm’. Dr A John Camm, a prominent cardiologist who lives in the UK, told a newspaper that he had never interacted with Yadav ever.
Yadav claimed to have been awarded membership by the prestigious British Cardiac Society and said he joined the St. George’s Hospital in London as an interventional cardiologist in 2002. He also claimed to have been an editor with the British Medical Journal.
According to the website, Yadav claimed to have joined Escorts Heart Institute, New Delhi in 2003 and then worked in Chicago where he trained with other specialists for years.
“He came to India in January 2006 and joined Wockhardt Heart Centre, Hyderabad, as Consultant Interventional Cardiologist. He performed a few outstanding cases which were published in a couple of national dailies,” his profile claimed.
In the last decade alone, he claimed to have performed more than 15,000 complex angioplasties.

The red flags that were missed
In the complaint filed with the police on April 6 by Dr MK Jain, Chief Medical and Health Officer of Damoh, said that Yadav had performed angiographies and angioplasties without the necessary registration with the Madhya Pradesh Medical Council.
Dr Jain’s investigation also uncovered serious discrepancies in the surgeon’s credentials, with documents from Mission Hospital failing to provide essential registration details.
“The registration was neither displayed on his documents nor available on the Andhra Pradesh Medical Council’s official portal, despite the hospital presenting it as his issuing body,” the FIR noted.
The hospital manager was also under scrutiny for presenting degree certificates and registration documents that lacked official verification numbers from any recognized university or council. There had also been multiple cases filed against Yadav in different states over the years, but they somehow were missed.
Police registered a case under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections related to fraud, forgery, misappropriation, and criminal conspiracy. Investigators say the accused not only fabricated documents but also posed as a UK-educated doctor, exploiting the name of the real Prof. John Camm.
However, there’s no case of medical negligence filed against him so far for the deaths of patients.
Police discovered that Yadav had been staying at Damoh’s Utsav Villas hotel Room 105 since joining Mission Hospital on a salary of Rs 8 lakh a month, and that the bill was being paid by the hospital management. Hotel staff said that he never allowed anyone to enter his room while he lived there.
Yadav was finally arrested in Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh on April 7.
The UK-based Dr Camm told The Indian Express that this impersonation was an issue that came up five years ago. But just a couple of years ago, the Twitter handle of Dr N John Camm had sparked a controversy that put the doctor in the spotlight.
The online controversies of Dr N John Camm
While Parliamentary records pointed out that one Dr Narendra Yadav was punished by the Medical Council of India in 2014 for professional impropriety, little is known about his past. There was also a case filed in Telangana in 2019 related to the kidnapping of a UK-based doctor.
In 2023, the handle made national headlines after Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s office retweeted a tweet by him on riots in Paris.
“India must send @myogiadityanath to France to control riot situation there and My God, he will do it within 24 hours,” the N John Camm handle wrote in the tweet.
In March 2023, a cardiologist Dr Rohin Francis had pointed out multiple issues with the claims made by the Camm’s handle on various subjects. Among them was the fact that he didn’t seem to have worked at some of the hospitals he claimed to have worked at and a ‘hospital’ was actually a photo of a residential complex.

Fact-checker Mohammed Zubair from AltNews had tweeted in 2023 that he got a legal notice from the handle claiming that it was in no way linked to Yadav.