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Celebrated neurosurgeon Charlie Teo blames The Saturday Paper for his self-exile to China, although he says it’s okay to hug the theatre nurses there. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.

Charlie Teo’s self-exile to China

Neurosurgeon Charlie Teo speaking to the media in 2023.

Credit: AAP Image / Dan Himbrechts

Eight or nine years ago, the neurosurgeon Charlie Teo recently lamented, a journalist published a lengthy story in a small newspaper that, he alleged, had unfairly disparaged him and set in train the turning of what he called “the narrative against me”.

Worse, Teo said, was the awful clock that the article set off. The piece seemed to be the work of a conspiracy between journalists and the medical fraternity that sought, for reasons of professional envy and political correctness, to destroy his career.

Teo’s description of this story, given in a recent episode of the obscure podcast Café Locked Out, was remarkable. The article was all about “how terrible I was”, Teo said. The journalist “claimed in that article that he’d interviewed about four or six neurosurgeons and they all said the same things. And then he asked one of the neurosurgeons, ‘Why don’t you get together and destroy him?’ and the neurosurgeon said: ‘Who wants to be seen as the person who kills Bambi?’

“So, that was the light that went on because once that was written it became very clear that you can’t destroy someone who’s done nothing wrong. So what you’ve got to do is turn Bambi into a wolf, or you’ve got to turn Bambi into someone who isn’t lauded by the public and isn’t doing good things. So, from that minute on, you could see what they were thinking with their strategising.”

As it happens, that journalist was me and the small newspaper was the one you’re reading now. The article in question, “Charlie’s sheen”, was published in April 2017, and it was surprising to learn that in writing it I had not only joined a malicious conspiracy but had also committed the baffling indiscretion of publicly admitting as much in print.

The amusing irony of Teo’s characterisation is that the story, rather than being part of a great conspiracy, was motivated by precisely the opposite: Charlie Teo had long been the beneficiary of a credulous media that routinely exaggerated his abilities and misunderstood the nature of glioblastoma tumours, so much so that they had elevated him to the status of saint and miracle worker.

I have written about this before, so forgive my repetition, but some context is necessary. The 2017 article began when I received a lengthy, handwritten letter from a neurosurgeon. In it, they expressed concerns at the risks Teo took and his arrogant belief that his peers were cowardly or technically inferior when they deemed a tumour “inoperable”. Yet as the source told me – and many others would subsequently – the designation of “inoperable” does not mean that it is physically impossible to operate. Rather, in such a case, the risk of catastrophic injury vastly outweighed the benefits of surgery.

“Different patients want different evidence,” the same surgeon told me this week. “Some want data; others want a miracle. I don’t do miracles, I tell them, so those patients usually go elsewhere.”

The letter also expressed concern about the high fees Teo charged, which desperate families paid in the belief they would be receiving superior care.

Finally, the letter included several examples of reporting that had the effect of polishing Teo’s halo. The stories came in pairs: the first was a desperate plea from a family seeking to raise funds for Teo’s surgery; the second was a follow-up on the miracle surgery Teo had performed.

The neurosurgeon wrote that these paired stories should really have been trilogies, which would include obituaries for the patients, typically written just months after Teo had operated.

The letter writer did not suggest Teo was an incompetent surgeon; quite the opposite, in fact. The issue was the risks he took and the fees he charged.

Back in 2017 I asked Teo about the media coverage. Given its exaggerations and omissions – recipients of “life-saving surgery” were often dead within six months – I wondered if he felt any obligation in tempering reporting about his talents, especially when it appeared to encourage undue and immoderate public expectations.

“I am honest with my patients,” he said. “I tell all my patients that it has a 100 per cent mortality rate … There are some cases that are curable, but they are far and few between.”

It is a peculiarly malicious and conspiratorial media that helps transform a mortal into a god. In a fawning 2007 profile of Teo in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine, the writer concluded that any controversy in which Teo had been implicated seemed merely the function of naivety. “Boiled down, Teo’s main fault seems to be a lack of political nous.”

Teo himself said almost exactly the same thing in his podcast interview this month – that he “lacked political nous”. The media – the one that had made him the most famous surgeon in Australia – was “evil” and “fabricating” and operated “without guilt”.

Such is the quality of Charlie Teo’s rhetoric – impassioned, hyperbolic, righteously self-pitying – that it can distract from the issues that have encouraged the criticism or professional censure of him by the WA Supreme Court, the NSW Medical Board and the Health Care Complaints Commission.

Teo reserves much greater animosity for the investigative reporter Kate McClymont than he does for me, and for good reason. From 2019, in a series of articles for the Nine newspapers and televised reports for 60 Minutes, McClymont reported on Teo’s practices.

In one story, she reported on an Indian family whose four-year-old son, Mikolaj, had been diagnosed with a diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma. This type of tumour is aggressive and incurable. It is designated as inoperable – and almost universally so – because of its location and spread, and the understanding that any surgical intervention is highly likely to result in catastrophic damage. A second neurosurgeon independently confirmed the diagnosis.

Questing for a miracle, the family sought the counsel of Teo. His office assured them that surgery was not only possible but, if performed urgently, “there is a very high likelihood of cure if he does the surgery before radiation”. Naturally baffled by the disparity between Teo’s optimism and the severe prognoses of the local specialists, Mikolaj’s father sought more assurance. Another email arrived: “If all goes as planned, the surgery should be curative as we should be able to remove the entire thing.”

The family surrendered their life savings. It cost them $80,000 for the surgery, which was conducted in Singapore. Half an hour before surgery, Teo told the family that the tumour was, indeed, diffuse, but still the operation went ahead. It left Mikolaj paralysed and incapable of speech for his remaining 10 months of life.

In 2023, the Health Care Complaints Commission found Teo guilty of “unsatisfactory professional conduct”. The findings related to two patients, whose circumstances were not unlike Mikolaj’s: they submitted to expensive and futile surgery, were badly damaged as a result, and neither regained full consciousness. The committee “ultimately concluded that the practitioner’s judgment in deciding to operate on Patient A was inappropriate for the following reasons”, the commission wrote in its lengthy decision. “First, it was high-risk and inappropriate surgery by reason of the nature and location of the tumour, its genetic type, and that it was diffuse.”

Regarding Patient B, the committee found Teo had “carried out surgery which was different to that proposed to the patient, and the surgical strategy led to unwarranted and excessive removal of normal functional brain”.

The findings went further: unethical pressure was imposed upon Patient A to have the surgery; Teo slapped the face of the unresponsive Patient B; and he spoke with peculiar abrasiveness to patients and their families. One exchange, given in testimony, was accepted by the committee. “On or around 23 March 2019, the practitioner used inappropriate language during a telephone conversation with Person E, Patient B’s daughter, namely words to the effect of: a. ‘You’re asking the wrong fucking question’; b. ‘Would I do it all over again? Fucking oath I would. You should be grateful. I’ve given the family extra fucking time.’ ”

Charlie Teo was not deregistered. Rather, conditions were imposed on certain surgeries. He is otherwise free to practise in Australia.

In the recent podcast, Teo exaggerated his professional exile and spoke effusively of China – the country where he now often practises. China, he said, was a strong and purposeful country – uninfected by “wokeness” and “political correctness” and thus admirably productive.

“Joe Average would find China enlightening,” he said. “If you find a nurse who’s done the right thing by your patients and you give her a big hug, you don’t have to fear that you’ll be accused of sexual harassment.

“Just think of the olden days when you and I were lads, where we used to have those, you know, Friday afternoon doctors’ parties in the residents’ quarters, and again there was no fear of retribution for being a normal, natural person.”

Teo was talking here with Paul Oosterhuis, a Sydney anaesthetist suspended in 2021 after criticising Covid-19 vaccines and promoting quack treatments such as ivermectin. In the same podcast, Oosterhuis said his “new job” was “to fight tyranny with great joy”.

“Charlie still has the right to operate in Australia,” one neurosurgeon told me this week. “There is one operation he has to get signed off by a second opinion – that is a re-operation for glioblastoma. For most surgeons this would be less than 1 per cent of their practice. Even for specialist tumour surgeons, only 10 to 30 per cent of their glioma patients require a second operation. His exile is self-imposed.”

Back in 2017, when I was writing the story that Teo believes began his public decline, Teo agreed to an interview with me. “I don’t blame you for writing the article,” he said. “I have, rightly or wrongly, created angst amongst my colleagues. But the truth is here in my office. Speak to my fellows. It’s terrible what’s happening – you can’t be a prophet in your own land.”

As one medic told me this week: “He has no fucking personal insight – none. I think he sincerely believes that he’s the greatest, and that he’s truly been persecuted. But given his exceptional, almost singular behaviour, I think he’s been lucky.”

Reflecting upon Teo’s podcast appearance, another neurosurgeon told me: “He completely disregards the dead and damaged patients that led to the complaints. If the lady from WA had been well after the operation, she wouldn’t have needed repatriation, she could have caught the plane home. It wasn’t the ‘contrary second opinions’ or the ‘overly optimistic advice’ that led to his restrictions; it was the fact that the patients were injured by the surgery.”

As it has for decades, Teo’s self-martyrdom continues with the same theme: the virtuosic rebel who was simply too good to be left alone by the envious mediocrities that surround him.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 15, 2025 as "Charlie’s angles".

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