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Kamloops neurosurgeon to be tried for negligence after failed back surgery
A Kamloops doctor is facing a trial over medical negligence after a woman’s back surgeries left her in more pain than she arrived with.
The 61-year-old Williams Lake woman had chronic back and leg pain for more than a decade when Dr. Ferdinand Matanaj, a neurosurgeon, agreed to insert screws into her vertebrae to alleviate the pain in February 2021.
After the patient, Karen Chamberlain, filed the lawsuit in September 2023, Matanaj argued the two-year limitation period had passed and it should be tossed. A BC Supreme Court judge disagreed, largely because the patient didn’t know how severe her problems had become until the BC College of Physicians and Surgeons investigated her case.
In the spring of 2021, she was led by Matanaj to believe she might see improvements within six months to a year, and the pain she experienced was likely one of the potential risks he warned her about.
“It was, she says, only when she received the final reports… that those hopes were dashed, the true nature of Dr. Matanaj’s negligence and its consequences were revealed, and consequently that a legal action became justified,” Justice Warren Milman’s recent decision reads.
Chamberlain saw Matanaj first in 2017 after seeing other doctors for her chronic pain. The pain was relapsing after a pair of previous operations, but her last neurosurgeon couldn’t do the spinal decompression operation she was told she needed.
In Kamloops, Matanaj did the first of three operations on Feb. 1, 2021. He inserted two screws into her spine, but she awoke with severe leg pain because, as they soon discovered, they were touching a nerve. Chamberlain agreed to a second operation so they could be repositioned, which was done that same day.
“For reasons that are not explained in the record before me, Dr. Matanaj repositioned only one of the two screws. The other was left where it was,” Milman’s decision reads.
Chamberlain returned to Williams Lake the next day, but she was still in pain. Another medical scan found one of the two screws was still touching the nerve. In the third operation, four days later, Matanaj removed all the hardware.
Chamberlain said she continued treatment for the pain, but the root cause of her back issues appeared to remain unresolved.
By September 2021, she filed a complaint to the BC College of Physicians and Surgeons. An investigation found Matanaj “failed to meet the applicable standard of care” by selecting the wrong procedure, leaving one of the two screws in the incorrect place and by removing all the hardware instead of correcting the error, accoding to Milman’s decision.
The college’s report found Chamberlain’s condition would likely worsen because of Matanaj’s errors, according to the decision.
Matanaj argued Chamberlain “had the requisite knowledge” to file her lawsuit by March 2021, so the two-year limitation would have expired by that time.
Chamberlain disagreed, telling the court she “formed a belief” Matanaj didn’t properly treat her, but she held out hope she would recover based on his advice in April 2021 that it might improve. The college’s reports armed her with the knowledge she needed to bring the matter to court, according to the decision.
Milman agreed, finding the regulator’s report put the case “on an entirely new footing, involving different allegations of negligence leading to different, and more serious, consequences.”
Chamberlain’s complaint will move ahead to a civil trial against Matanaj, but it’s not clear when it will be scheduled.
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One response
Dear Levi,
My name is Dr. Ferdinand Matanaj and I am the neurosurgeon that you allude to on the “bait clicking” and libellous article published in your news portal on March 15,2026.
Please let me me make a very brief introduction about myself. I have been practicing neurosurgery in the city of Kamloops since 2014. From the firs day I arrived in this town I have been on call for my surgical patients every single day and night for the past 12 years. I have done it with pride and joy. I have never been asked to do it nor paid a penny to do it. I challenge you, your news organization and anyone else behind your libellous story to find a similar case not only in Kamloops, but anywhere in the Country. ( I have never before made it known or asked for any recognition.)
I also would like you to know that in my 26 years of experience as a physician, I have never been sued or disciplined by any medical or other bodies anywhere on the world.
I hope that you and your readers would forgive my lack of modesty, but I have to inform you that beyond my unmatched commitment to my profession I am very good at what I do. Again, I challenge you and your sources to find anyone among my colleagues in the region that have better results. I am one of only two neurosurgeons in Kamloops who has the legitimate training, certification and vast experience to perform complex spine surgery.
There is a saying in the surgical community ” The only surgeons without complications are those that do not perform surgeries”
For obvious reasons I can not go into many details of the case you have published, but let me make it known that the case you refer to had had two botched operations with permanent nerve injury and neurological deficits before I ever new about her case. I agreed to try to help her on purely humanitarian reasons since no other surgeon had agreed to even talk her.
I would like to bring to your attention important facts that you omit to publish or plead ignorance. Firstly there is no new information about the case secondly the expert for the college has admitted that he has never performed a similar case in his career and thirdly nor he or anyone else has disputed the scientific evidence provided for the case.
To conclude, in a normal world you would publish and celebrate a story of a neurosurgeon who has committed every minute of his life at the service of his patients in a health system that is filled with countless stories of physicians that would not stay a minute beyond their working hours. Physicians who leave patients without a doctor or worse leave town to work less and get paid more.
It is obvious that that you and your editor have been asked to publish this story simply as a hitman. You and whoever owns you should be ashamed for targeting one of the most committed physician in you community.
Please show me any story that you have published of a physician being sued in our region in the past 3 years, if you claim that this type of story is of any public interest.