A SMITTEN surgeon who wrote love letters to one of his patients has been struck off the medical register.

Dr Sachiendra Amaragiri used his hospital position to find the woman’s home address and wrote to her, saying she had “twanged some distant chord which had laid dormant” for many years.

Just five weeks after performing an intimate procedure on her, the besotted consultant wrote to invite her for coffee, saying “When you stepped into my clinic for the first time, I was suddenly stunned and taken aback by your presence.”

The 59-year-old added: "For a number of weeks now, I have been deliberating and strongly resisted writing this. However, my feelings and my emotions have taken the better of my logical rational reasoning.”

But the woman, known only as Patient A, called police and later told the authorities that she felt “violated” when reading the letter.

A five-day Medical Practitioners Tribunal heard the surgeon, from Consett in County Durham, had met the woman while working as a locum at a West Midlands hospital in the summer of 2015.

She had been admitted to hospital in Dudley for a week suffering from stomach pain and in September Dr Amaragiri performed a colonoscopy on her, in which a camera was passed into her bowel while she was naked from the waist down apart from a hospital gown.

In a statement to the Manchester tribunal, Patient A said she felt “shocked and shaken” when she opened the letter from the consultant just a few weeks later.

She said: “I felt completely violated. It was not as if the doctor was looking at my arm. It was a very private area, a personal area which I had trusted him with”.

The patient added: “I have still been left very frightened by the whole situation. I do not want to see any doctor ever again - I feel like I have completely lost all trust”.

In the letter, which had a postmark showing it had been sent from near his County Durham home, Dr Amaragiri, wrote: "You induced this unusually extraordinary tender feelings of weakness in my emotional setting. To this day I have been unable to fathom this power you hold on me”.

Although no crime had been committed, police advised the woman to report the incident to medical authorities.

Once the allegations came to light, the doctor wrote to the patient apologising for his actions, saying: “I am terribly sorry. I accept full responsibility for my moment of indiscreet, irrational action that has led to this investigation”.

The doctor, who did not attend the misconduct hearing, insisted he had not taken advantage of Patient A and described his letter as a "moment of madness”.

Members of the tribunal accepted that the letter had been an “isolated incident” but described the doctor’s behaviour as “predatory” and added “there is a risk of repetition of the type of behaviour which led to the finding of misconduct”.

The tribunal concluded: “that this was a particularly serious departure from the fundamental tenets of the behaviour expected of the medical profession”.

It found a misconduct case against Dr Amaragiri had been proven and ordered that his name be erased from the medical register.