Anatomy of a Tragedy

Texas Observer ^ | August 28, 2013 | Saul Elbein

[Auntie Mame]

The following very well written article is from 2013. I post it because this doctor was just criminally convicted (a very rare occurrence for a doctor), see http://courthousenews.com/texas-doctor-criminally-convicted-for-poor-care/

Anatomy of a Tragedy

In late 2010, Dr. Christopher Duntsch came to Dallas to start a neurosurgery practice. By the time the Texas Medical Board revoked his license in June 2013, Duntsch had left two patients dead and four paralyzed in a series of botched surgeries.

Physicians who complained about Duntsch to the Texas Medical Board and to the hospitals he worked at described his practice in superlative terms. They used phrases like “the worst surgeon I’ve ever seen.” One doctor I spoke with, brought in to repair one of Duntsch’s spinal fusion cases, remarked that it seemed Duntsch had learned everything perfectly just so he could do the opposite. Another doctor compared Duntsch to Hannibal Lecter three times in eight minutes.

When the Medical Board suspended Duntsch’s license, the agency’s spokespeople too seemed shocked.

“It’s a completely egregious case,’’ Leigh Hopper, then head of communications for the Texas Medical Board, told The Dallas Morning News in June. “We’ve seen neurosurgeons get in trouble but not one such as this, in terms of the number of medical errors in such a short time.”

But the real tragedy of the Christopher Duntsch story is how preventable it was. Over the course of 2012 and 2013, even as the Texas Medical Board and the hospitals he worked with received repeated complaints from a half-dozen doctors and lawyers begging them to take action, Duntsch continued to practice medicine. Doctors brought in to clean up his surgeries decried his “surgical misadventures,” according to hospital records. His mistakes were obvious and well-documented. And still it took the Texas Medical Board more than a year to stop Duntsch—a year in which he kept bringing into the operating room patients who ended up seriously injured or dead.

In Duntsch’s case, we see the weakness of Texas’ unregulated system of health care, a system built to protect doctors and hospitals. And a system in which there’s no way to know for sure if your doctor is dangerous.

Up until 2003, medical care in Texas was regulated by a system of checks. Hospital management, the court system and the Texas Medical Board formed a web of regulation that penalized and prevented bad care.

But in the past 10 years, a series of conservative reforms have severely limited patients’ options for holding doctors and hospitals accountable for bad care. In 2003, the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature capped pain-and-suffering damages in medical malpractice lawsuits at $250,000. Even if a plaintiff wins the maximum award, after you pay your lawyer and your experts and go through, potentially, years of trial, not much is left.

The Legislature has also made suing hospitals difficult. Texas law states­ that hospitals are liable for damages caused by doctors in their facilities only if the plaintiff can prove that the hospital acted with “malice”—that is, the hospital knew of extreme risk and ignored it—in credentialing a doctor. But the Legislature hindered plaintiffs’ cases even more by allowing hospitals to, in most cases, keep credentialing information confidential. In effect, plaintiffs have to prove a very tough case without access to the necessary hospital records. This is an almost impossible standard to meet, and it has left hospitals immune to the actions of whatever doctors they bring on. Hospitals can get all of the benefit of an expensive surgeon practicing in their facility and little of the exposure. This has freed hospitals from the fear of litigation, but it’s also removed the financial motivation for policing their own physicians.

The medical malpractice cap and the near-immunity for hospitals snapped two threads from the regulatory web. What remained was the Texas Medical Board.

This is just a portion of the article. If you want to read more, go to https://www.texasobserver.org/anatomy-tragedy/

[Auntie Mame]

This guy maimed and killed people for three years before he was finally stopped. Not only patients but other doctors were reporting him but it took three years before his license was revoked.

Patients continued to go to him, the hospital(s) he worked at never letting anyone know that he left behind him a string of dead butchered paralyzed patients.

He has just been held criminally liable, see:

Texas Doctor Criminally Convicted for Poor Care

DALLAS (CN) – A Texas jury found a neurosurgeon guilty Tuesday of maiming an elderly patient in an exceptionally rare conviction of a medical doctor for giving substandard care.

The Dallas County jury deliberated for over four hours before it found Dr. Christopher Duntsch guilty of injury to an elderly person. He faces 5 to 99 years or life in state prison. He was arrested in July 2015 and also indicted on five counts of aggravated assault causing serious bodily injury.

During the two-week trial, jurors heard testimony from several of Duntsch’s former patients. They heard testimony about major nerves and arteries being cut, improper placement of implants and the devastating permanent injuries that resulted.

Mary Efurd, 78, testified that she awoke from spinal fusion surgery in severe pain, putting her in a wheelchair. Prosecutors contend surgical implants were incorrectly placed inside her, resulting in permanent damage. They cited an email message Duntsch sent to a girlfriend six years ago that stated he was a “cold-blooded killer.”

Defense attorney Robbie McClung, of Dallas, did not dispute the surgeries were botched. She argued that Duntsch was not a properly trained or skilled surgeon who did the best he could in chaotic operating rooms. The defense downplayed the damning email message as sarcasm and blamed hospitals and medical regulators for enabling Duntsch to continue performing botched surgeries.

More at this link: http://courthousenews.com/texas-doctor-criminally-convicted-for-poor-care/

[Gaffer]

[The Sons of Liberty]

The strongest and most powerful union in the country is the AMA.

[originalbuckeye]

‘But in the past 10 years, a series of conservative reforms have severely limited patients’ options for holding doctors and hospitals accountable for bad care’

Always the Conserrvative’s fault, yes? And the limits on ‘pain and suffering’ are the same as the ‘pain and suffering’ limits of HMOs, which have been promoted as a way to fix our Medical System (before Obamacare, that is) In this instance, it should be determined if the ‘mistakes’ were avoidable or an accident. Obviously, this guy was either incompetent or a sadist. I’m glad he is out of the medical pool, just hope he gets his just punishment.

[wastoute]

The libtards have politically weaponized even the air we breathe. That said, I have some personal experience in neurosurgery training having spent 6 years in it in the 80s. Until I was screwed in my last year by a facutly member who was himself very limited in his abilities. You would be surprised at what happens. Guys who were afraid to say boo to their shadow and never touched a scalpel themselves were allowed to “finish” and go out into the world and NO ONE had ever actually watched them do a damn thing. I personally watched a faculty member who was in this category reach into a wound with a rongeur and pull up a lumbar radicle.

It is just the way of the world. My sin, too ambitious, too aggressive, to committed to doing my best to become excellent BEFORE finishing “training”. “Established” people find that personality type threatening I discovered too late. Oh the stories I could tell but I would not change the names so I had best not.

Curious, the Tennessee program is one of the oldest and best respected neurosurgery training programs but I suspect it is also in the “watch me for 7 years and then beat it” category.

[originalbuckeye]

I worked at one of the best hospitals in the country. I am a lab technologist. I realized that medicine had been politicized when one of our researchers, who was in the process of being feted for his breakthroughs in the treatment of a certain type of cancer, was found to have faked his data. He didn’t lose his license, but had to leave for another hospital and was barred from doing research forever. It was a ‘publish or perish’ institution and the pressures were great to produce results, but he got caught. One only need look at the ‘research funding’ these days to guess what the outcome of the project will be. When my friends are worried about some new ‘risk’ being outed by some new research project, I just tell them to wait 6 months. There will be another research project finding the exact opposite of what was just announced. Breaks my heart that EVERYTHING has been politicized. Medicine should stand alone, outside the manipulations of politics.

[Auntie Mame]

Texas Doctor Gets Life in Prison for Botched Surgery

DAVID LEE

February 21, 2017February 21, 2017 doctor, Duntsch, Law1, Medical, Texas

DALLAS (CN) – A Dallas County jury deliberated for one hour Monday before sentencing neurosurgeon Christopher Duntsch to life in state prison for maiming an elderly patient in a botched surgery.

The 12-member jury convicted Duntsch, of Plano, on Feb. 14 of injury to an elderly person – an exceptionally rare conviction of a medical doctor for substandard care. He was arrested in July 2015 and indicted on five counts of aggravated assault causing serious bodily injury.

Dallas County District Attorney Faith Johnson said after sentencing that her prosecutors “have done something historic” and that she is “so elated” with the life sentence. She said it was the first conviction of its kind in Dallas County.

“We hope [the victims] will just have a little joy to know that the person that did this thing to them will be serving a life sentence,” Johnson said.

On Friday, a surgeon who turned in Duntsch to state regulators for maiming several patients testified that the Texas Medical Board was unable to stop him.

Dr. Randall Kirby told jurors he sent information the Texas Medical Board about at least five of Duntsch’s botched surgeries. Kirby filed the complaint after he witnessed the spinal surgery of Jeff Glidewell in 2013. He testified that it looked like Duntsch “tried to decapitate” Glidewell.

“The Texas Medical Board is not set up to stop someone like Christopher Duntsch,” an exasperated Kirby testified. “It is inconceivable that someone like this would get out into practice.”

Kirby said Glidewell would have become quadriplegic had doctors not done another operation to stabilize his spine. They also had to repair his esophagus and remove a sponge left inside him.

“This has not happened in the United States of America, where you can do such a procedure and have such complications: leave a sponge, knock a hole in his esophagus, take out the recurrent laryngeal nerve, take out the vertebral artery and just leave him there without any attempt to transfer,” Kirby testified.

Jurors wept during the three-day sentencing phase as they heard emotional testimony from Duntsch’s patients. Photographs of several of Duntsch’s maimed and killed patients were displayed in the courtroom next to large sheets of paper listing each of their post-surgery ailments.
Patient Jacqueline Troy testified Friday that she nearly died after Duntsch operated on her in 2012 to relieve back pain from a car collision. She said her esophagus was pinned under a surgical plate implanted near her spine, her trachea was punctured and a feeding tube allowed food to get into her lungs.

Her husband, Tom Troy, testified that he feared she would die after the surgery.

“She did not know what was going on,” he said. “She did not know what was happening to her.”

Dr. Martin Lazar, a neurosurgeon testifying for the prosecution, said Troy’s surgery was a “disaster, an unmitigated disaster.” Lazar said he suspects the surgeries were performed by someone “who has no conscience, no empathy” and that Troy’s surgery was unnecessary to begin with.

“This has the appearance that the patients were treated like cannon fodder. They were just there to be operated on,” Lazar testified Friday.

Lazar said Duntsch apparently thought he had found a tumor in Glidewell’s neck, though it was really a muscle.

Lead prosecutor Michelle Shughart thanked the Dallas-area medical community for their assistance.

“We want to thank them so much for teaching us everything we needed to know on how to prosecute this case,” Shugart told reporters. “We did this for the victims, for what they have suffered, and we want everyone to know this will not be tolerated.”

Shughart said the list of victims “went on and on,” and that if had been only a few patients, it would be a civil malpractice matter instead criminal.

When asked if other parties are responsible for not having stopped Duntsch, Johnson said several civil cases filed by his victims are pending against four area hospitals.

In one case, against Baylor Health Care System, a patient claims fellow doctors called Duntsch “dangerous” and “the worst surgeon they had ever seen.” That patient claims Duntsch operated on his incorrect body part. Patients also have claimed that Duntsch operated after drinking alcohol and taking cocaine.

“The defendant was not the only one that was a part of this,” Johnson said. “He has taken the criminal blame.”

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