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I'll let you know right away that there was a happy ending here.

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Yes, a Portland hospital — one of the Pacific Northwest's supposed premier medical institutions — allegedly botched a heart surgery on a 13-year-old girl by installing a valve completely upside down, then spent nearly three weeks gaslighting her parents that their daughter was dying from the "shock" of surgery.

And it was all because of this guy:

According to a $17-million lawsuit filed by the girl's parents, the nightmare started back in August 2025 at OHSU Doernbecher Children's Hospital. Their daughter underwent heart surgery, and things went south immediately when her heart wouldn't restart properly post-op. For more than two weeks, she was on life support while OHSU staff reportedly insisted it was just surgical trauma.

But when the Stokes family managed a last-ditch transfer to Seattle, the truth came out: The valve was in backwards. Seattle surgeons swapped it out correctly, and boom — her heart started functioning well enough to come off bypass.

Here's Dr. Muralidaran's background:

Dr. Muralidaran earned his medical degree from Madras Medical College in India. He completed his residency in general surgery at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. He completed research fellowships at the Fetal Care Research Foundation in Chennai, India; in hepatobiliary surgery at the University of Southern California; and in pediatric cardiothoracic surgery at Stanford University. He also completed fellowships in thoracic surgery at the Yale University/Yale New Haven Medical Center and in pediatric and congenital cardiac surgery at Stanford University.

If you look back up at the Libs of TikTok post, you'll see (at least at time of publishing), this note:

But here's where I want you to think harder than the clapping seals who say "BUT LOOK AT THE CREDENTIALS!"

In the past few years, we've learned that the vast majority of our institutions are corrupt and/or ineffective. Ivy League schools have festered with DEI and other ideological garbage that has tanked their objective ability to produce quality students. Never forget that Harvard's president resigned in 2024 for plagiarizing, or that a Harvard ethics professor was fired for lying in a study about honesty.

Yale now offers a course on whether white and black women can be friends, and Stanford offers a course on Taylor Swift lyrics. These are not serious institutions anymore.

Outside of schools, consider the trucking fraud running rampant across the country. We were assured that the licensing agencies are only providing CDLs to qualified candidates, and yet every week there's a new illegal alien who can't speak English that rams his 18-wheeler into an American family. Until recently, you probably thought that system was secure.

What about USAID? What was meant to be a humanitarian relief entity was using your tax dollars to funnel billions of dollars toward leftwing politicians and causes, both in the United States and abroad. Up until 2025, I bet all of you thought that system was generally secure.

And Medicaid? Hundreds of thousands of migrants, if not millions, are benefiting directly from vast fraud schemes that allow them to milk the welfare system so they can drive expensive cars that they park in lavish homes. But until one man with a camera went to go visit the Learing Centers in Minneapolis, everyone thought the system was generally secure.

That begs the question: How secure is our medical system?

Some food for thought:

In the story about Dr. Muralidaran, there's no evidence that he cheated the system or was allowed to practice medicine despite major red flags. He may very well be a smart, caring doctor who made a single, tragic mistake.

But no matter how many community notes you write about his education and pedigree, public trust is gone. Trust is a genie that you can't put back in the bottle, except by taking very hard and expensive steps to regain that trust.

In other words, the problem is not that Dr. Muralidaran is Indian. The problem is that our institutions are compromised and no one trusts them anymore.

Like it or not, every story about Indian doctors is going to be a lightning rod for that conversation. It's a matter of life or death.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.