The word doctor actually comes from the Latin word for “teacher.” These were meant to be people of knowledge and expertise. People who knew things the rest of us didn’t. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? In a general sense, that still holds true. But if you pay attention to the news, you know that not every doctor is all that smart and some are doing some extremely questionable things.
10. The Liver Scribe
Simon Bramhall was a British surgeon who was tasked with saving people’s lives. He performed two separate liver transplants in the summer of 2013 and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to say he saved the lives of the patients he worked on. The problem was that wasn’t all he did.
While he was in there,he used a tool called an argon beam coagulator. It’s a tool that shoots ionized argon gas at a cut, allowing the wound to coagulate the blood without contact, effectively stopping it from bleeding. The electrical current that ionizes the gas can also destroy tissue, which is how it’s used in some cancer treatments. And, if you’re a guy like Dr. Bramhall, it can be used to burn your initials in someone’s liver.
Bramhall signed his initials on two separate livers and no one would have been any the wiser if not for one patient rejecting the transplant. When doctors went back in, they found the branded organ.
Bramhall was found guilty of assault, paid a fine, and lost his license to practice medicine. He then took up writing novels and has one called “The Letterman” which is about what he did. The description of the book includes the line “who wins when everyone loses?”
9. The Marrow Cure
If you ever want to discredit someone who still believes vaccines cause autism, direct them to Dr. Hugh Fudenberg, an immunologist and arguable madman who apparently knew less about science than a schnauzer.
Fudenberg believed he could cure autism and any doctor would probably want to believe that’s true. However, Fudenberg’s cure was giving children his own bone marrow. He was a collaborator with Andrew Wakefield on that study that has been cited for years now by anti vaxxers as a reason to not vaccinate their kids despite how often it’s been debunked as fraud. He also believed flu vaccines were causing Alzheimer’s and his crackpot research that has been thoroughly debunked ended up being cited by Bill Maher on Larry King Live. He also lost his license to practice after the state board determined he was illegally obtaining medication for his own personal use.
8. The Daddy Doctors
Those who meet qualifications to donate sperm can make between $70 and $100 per donation, depending on where they go. Some donors can end up fathering hundreds of children. But this all typically follows a process of a man qualifying and following set procedures to ensure he is healthy and fits the profile needed. If a doctor wanted to sidestep those rules, do you think he could? The answer is yes. And it’s happened more than once.
A Dutch doctor was determined to have fathered 49 children in secret, swapping his own genetic material with that of donors. Families became suspicious when their children exhibited characteristics not in line with those of the donor, such as brown eyes when the donor and mother had blue eyes. Plus, some of them just looked like the doctor.
A doctor in Canada did the same thing, impregnating at least 17 women before he was caught. Some of the sperm used was his own, but some was just a mystery. Seventeen were identified as his, but 83 more children had unidentified fathers. That resulted in him not only losing his medical license, but a $13.3 million class action suit.
7. The Sterility Doctor
Javaid Perwaiz was an OB/GYN in Washington when he was running a health insurance scam to line his own pockets. He would perform unnecessary surgeries and bill insurance companies for them. Effectively, he was robbing the companies but also destroying the lives of his patients as well, none of whom needed the irreversible procedures he performed. Because of his speciality, he performed things like hysterectomies and sterilizations.
He bilked the government and insurance companies of more than $20 million. Law enforcement seized his assets, which included a Bentley and two homes.
He committed 52 counts of health care fraud, which ended up giving him 59 years in prison. But the human toll was far greater, considering that he needlessly robbed numerous women of their ability to have children. It’s not clear if he ever faced any specific punishment for what amounted to serious physical assaults against his victims.
6. The Organ Thieves
Word is a human heart can make you a millionaire on the black market. A liver is worth a little over half that much. A kidney is about a quarter. So if you have the skill to remove, handle, store, transport, and sell those organs, you could have a good side hustle as a serial killer. Lucky for the rest of us that most people can’t or won’t do that. But most people isn’t everyone.
Pathologists in Israel were harvesting organs from dead Palestinians without consent, a charge they admitted to after a Swedish paper accused the government of killing the Palestinians specifically for that purpose.
According to the government,they did harvest things like skin, corneas, hearts and bones not just from Palestinians but Israelis and foreigners, all of which was done without consent. But, they also claimed, it was over a decade prior to the report coming out and they hadn’t done it since.
5. The Baby Seller
The cost of going to the hospital in America is astronomical. Giving birth costs somewhere between $5000 and $11000 depending on your state. A C-section costs more. And if you need a room for overnight, you can expect the cost to double. So it’s not hard to imagine the cost of having a baby can be pretty stressful if you don’t have insurance or some other means to cover it.
If you wonder what happens when someone can’t afford it and they live in a country that’s less forgiving of debts, wonder no more. In 2021 reports emerged of a couple in Tulamba, Pakistan who couldn’t afford the private hospital bill for the delivery of their child. The doctor suggested a method of settling the debt – they could sell the baby. The couple refused, so the doctor took the child and sold it, anyway.
Police later arrested the doctor and, weirdly, there was no word on the baby.
4. The Hells Angels Hit
If you ever find yourself on trial for doling out fraudulent opioid prescriptions, make sure you think twice about ordering a hit on the witness against you. It’s just going to make things worse.
Anatoly Braylovsky had already been warned about giving out shady prescriptions, but he kept doing it, selling them for money. So when he was finally charged with it formally, he decided that he could maybe hire a hitman from the Hells Angels biker gang to make the problem go away. He broached the subject with a guy who turned out to be an FBI informant. An agent then went undercover as the hitman to make sure the doctor was very sure about what he wanted. He told the supposed hitman that he’d spend five days in prison before his trial and it was the worst thing he’d ever experienced. He needed to make sure he was never going back, which meant getting rid of the witness against him.
Getting caught in his murder for hire scheme has added a charge of obstruction of justice to the medical fraud that he was already charged with.
3. Dr. Nudes
It’s been a joke on the internet for a long time now that people will send you unsolicited nude pics with far too great a frequency. And by people we mean guys. And by nude, we mean a rather specific part of their anatomy. As many as 80% of men and 50% of women have received unsolicited nude pics. And while this is an offensive pitfall of life on the internet, you certainly don’t expect to experience this in real life. And certainly not at a doctor’s office. And yet that’s what happened to patients of Canadian Dr. Nigel Phipps.
Phipps was a family doctor and, according to accusations, he showed cell phone pictures of himself naked and semi-naked to 11 patients and three staff members. The medical board ended up suspending Phipps for 14 months, but didn’t take his license. Instead, he’s forbidden from treating patients without another healthcare professional present and he needs to see a psychiatrist as well as pay for therapy for those he victimized.
In what seems to be a weird twist, the doctor-rating site RateMDs has him listed as a 4.5 out of 5 star doctor. These include reviews from after his suspension.
2. The Biggest Liar Ever
No one likes a braggart or a know it all, which means very few people must have liked Paolo Macchiarini, a doctor once described as a trailblazer in the world of stem cell research. His wikipedia page introduces him as a conman.
Macchiarini was instrumental in introducing a new kind of windpipe surgery that involved transplanting a new esophagus grown with stem cells into patients. He used a donor esophagus and seeded it with new cells. Six of the eight patients who received the surgery ended up dying. The doctor was accused of falsifying data and committing fraud.
Even in his private life, Macchiarini couldn’t keep things above board. He started an affair with a producer from the show Dateline and even got engaged to her despite the fact he had been married for 30 years already. He told people that the Pope himself was going to officiate the wedding and guests would include the Clintons, the Emperor of Japan, and then-President Obama.
1. Dr. Sextsalot
The internet is awash on statistics about teen sexting, just one more thing for paranoid parents to worry about. You know what far less people talk about? Doctor sexting. And which one worries you more? The ones where a couple of kids say inappropriate stuff to each other late at night or the one where the man responsible for maintaining your anesthesia during surgery is rattling off filth in the middle of your surgery?
Arthur Zilberstein got suspended when he was found to be repeatedly sending dirty text messages in the middle of procedures, including one surgery during which he sent 45 messages.
The nimble fingered doctor was rattling them off during appendectomies, epidurals and, of course, cesarean deliveries because what’s more conducive to sending dirty text messages than that? Some of his texts were inviting a woman, a former patient, to come to the hospital to have sex.
Zilberstein was also apparently snapping off pics of his nether regions in various hospital rooms, taking medical records to look at nude pictures of patients, and prescribing pills without making records of it.