You’d think that anyone who puts the time, effort and money into becoming a doctor would really be committed to helping people. Years of medical school, huge tuition fees and, arguably, a lot of intelligence need to be involved. And yet, despite that, you keep hearing stories of doctors doing things so remarkably dumb or terrible that they end up losing their licenses over it. Like these then.
10. Amputating a Toe on the Porch
By and large, most of us want to get through life with all the parts we had when we started it. But alas, fate is unkind and every so often, you have to bid farewell to some random bits and pieces. Maybe you get in an accident or maybe you need to have something amputated to prevent further damage. For instance, if you get a bad infection, it doesn’t get treated properly, and then gangrene forms. That could lead right to an amputation and that’s just what happened to one Missouri man who chose the wrong doctor.
The man’s toe had gone gangrenous, so former doctor John Ure decided to amputate. This is where the details become important. Ure’s office was also a machine shed. It had no running water or even an exam table. And when Ure performed the amputation, it was on the porch.
Ure said everything was sterile, and he did exactly what any doctor would have done. Medical records suggest that may not be true, since he wasn’t even given antibiotics. But he did prescribe painkillers to two other patients in an improper manner, all of which led to him losing his license.
9. Prescribing Pot Cookies to a Misdiagnosed 4-Year-Old
Children are the creators of acting childish, it’s right in the name. And sure, some adults are not entirely free from childishness either, based on the never ending stream of viral videos we’ve all seen of people behaving badly, but at least if it’s an actual child it can be more easily understood and dealt with. Kids need to learn right from wrong and be shown how to deal with their feelings. And sometimes, if a parent struggles with that, a doctor may need to be consulted to help out. You just hope the doctor knows what he’s talking about.
William S. Eidleman, a Los Angeles “natural medicine physician” was consulted by some parents of a four-year-old who was having temper tantrums. That in and of itself is hardly noteworthy, but Eidelman’s prescription was. He gave the kid pot cookies. That’s cookies made with marijuana.
The parents had actually been following the doc’s recommendations, but things went sideways when the kid asked the school nurse for more marijuana cookies in the middle of the day. The state medical board found the doctor had improperly diagnosed the boy with ADHD and bi-polar disorder. It wasn’t actually the pot that got his license revoked, but that hasty diagnosis which they called “grossly negligent.”
8. Filming Dance Videos While Botching Surgery
Windell Davis-Boutte had some viral fame as a dancing doctor, with YouTube videos showing her performing surgical procedures while dancing to popular music. She also had to pay nearly $200,000 back to patients who never received surgeries after she became embroiled in a scandal that saw her license revoked for over two years.
While the dancing videos were questionable, especially since sometimes they involved seemingly unconscious patients, it was the many charges of malpractice that got her license pulled. Patients claimed they had numerous complications after botched procedures, with one even claiming brain damage. The fact that Boutte was a dermatologist makes that even more remarkable. She had told patients she was a certified plastic surgeon and performed plastic surgery operations when she was not qualified to do so.
7. Drugging Pregnant Women to Induce Labor and Make More Money
The band Loverboy has a song called “Working for the Weekend.” It’s about working all week to get to the weekend. Pretty self-explanatory. It is the exact opposite of the life that was being led by obstetrician Paul Shuen. Shuen had developed a remarkable racket for himself that saw him reaping big financial rewards, and all he had to do was force women to give birth on the weekend, whether it was time for them to do so or not.
In Canada, where Shuen worked, it’s the government that ensures doctors get paid. The pay structure was such that a birth on a weekday pays about $498. However, hospitals are often shorter staffed on weekends, so a weekend birth paid $748. Doctors also have a cap on how many deliveries they can perform in a month. So Shuen came up with a plan.
He administered a drug called misoprostol to his patients without their knowledge or consent. It’s used to induce labor, and he did so to try to ensure weekend births whenever possible. One day in 2016, five different women showed up with rapid labor. He was caught out when nurses began finding evidence of the medication inside of patients. But the process was slow, and Shuen had been doing this for years before his license was finally revoked.
6. Being Drunk and Then Committing Massive Fraud
There’s an old saying about taking a shot of liquid courage before doing something daring. It just refers to a quick drink of alcohol to settle your nerves and give you confidence. It actually works for some people, but you probably don’t want your doctor to be one of those people.
Marco Antonio Chavez was a psychiatrist in San Diego when he lost his license for practicing while intoxicated. The man was no teetotaler either; he was accused of drinking two 8-ounce glasses, or one pint, of vodka mixed with cloves. That’s a little over 10 standard shots. He claimed the drinks, which he had started at six in the morning, were meant to make him stop drinking because they tasted so bad.
That all happened back in 2018. In 2020, Chavez made headlines again for defrauding Tricare, a company that deals in healthcare benefits for military service members. He was ordered to pay back over $783,000.
5. Posting Racist Messages on Social Media Related to the Job
When you go to see a doctor, it’s rare you have any idea what kind of person they are in their everyday life. You really don’t need a window into that because they’re not your friend, they’re a doctor. But thanks to social media, vast numbers of people are absolutely incapable of keeping their personal feelings to themselves even when those feelings are just terrible. Even racist, as was the case with one Ohio doctor.
Lara Kollab was working at the Cleveland Clinic for just three months when the clinic saw fit to let her go after someone drew their attention to tweets made by Kollab. In the tweets, long since deleted, Kollab talked about intentionally prescribing the wrong medications to Jewish patients. She then lost a second residency in California for submitting false or misleading information during the interview process.
A year later, she had her license revoked, permanently banning her from practicing osteopathic medicine in Ohio.
4. Claiming to Cure Ebola and Other Life-Threatening Diseases with Sound
Ebola is one of the most terrifying diseases in existence. It kills upwards of 90% of infected patients and it’s not a pleasant experience. The disease causes your cells to break down and you bleed out of every orifice you have, basically. You don’t want to get it. And if you do get it, do not let William Edwin Gray III treat you because the man’s treatments are no good. In fact, they got his license revoked.
Gray claimed to be a homeopath, but he did graduate from Stanford Medical School in 1970. He sold cures for Ebola and other conditions on his personal website in the form of MP3 sound files. They cost $5.
The treatments don’t even rise to the level of homeopathy, so it’s weirdly a dual layered fraud. He claimed some nonsense on his site about how a homeopathic solution creates clusters of molecules that radiate energy which can then be amplified and recorded as a sound wave and that was what he was selling.
Gray claimed his treatment was curing malaria in Sierra Leone. Despite his claims it could also cure swine flu fever, headache and more, the state medical board revoked his license.
3. Branding Sex Slaves for a Cult
When delving into the whole NVIXM cult, there’s a lot to unpack and very little of it’s good. But in the midst of all the crazy stories, there’s one that some people overlooked relating to a doctor who was involved with the group.
In 2021, Danielle Roberts had her license revoked for engaging in 12 forms of professional misconduct. The most notable of those was the use of a tool meant to cauterize wounds to brand the initials of the cult leader into 17 different women who were being used as a sex slaves. The brands were meant to signify they were the property of the cult leader, a man currently serving 120 years in prison on a variety of charges.. This branding was also done with no anesthetic to intentionally cause pain. Her lawyer said the decision would be appealed because, in her capacity as a brander of sex slaves for a cult, she was not acting as a medical professional so those rules shouldn’t apply to her in that case.
2. Installing Unnecessary Pacemakers
Healthcare fraud is a big deal and we’ve already seen some evidence of that from one or two shady doctors. It’s when the fraud starts to involve implanting things in humans that it’s really gone off the rails, and that’s just what happened in Kentucky with Anis Chalhoub.
Not only did Chalhoub lose his license, he was also ordered to pay $250,000 and sentenced to over three years in prison. His crime was giving people unnecessary pacemakers. Of the 234 he gave to patients between 2007 and 2011, evidence indicated that dozens of them were done when patients didn’t meet the criteria. In some cases, he told patients they would die if they didn’t get the pacemaker when their conditions were not fatal.
As you might guess, every time he performed the surgery, he got paid for it, which was his chief motivator for the fraud.
1. Declaring a Baby Dead When They Weren’t
This story doesn’t have much of a happy ending, but things could have been much worse and it’s all the fault of one particularly negligent doctor. Back in 2013, a child was born in a hospital in Eastern China and declared dead by the delivery doctor. That’s a harrowing experience for any parent, but imagine what they must have felt two days later when the funeral home where the child was sent to be cremated reported that the child was actually still alive.
Workers notified the hospital, and the boy was brought back to be treated, but the prognosis didn’t sound promising. The child apparently had a respiratory system deformity, and the hospital claimed to be treating him for “humanitarian reasons.”
The doctor who declared him dead lost his license, and the story ended by explaining that the baby was in critical condition with no further updates.