I understand protecting hospitals and doctors, but when it's at a point where someone like this can practice for years, it's gone too far. Anatomy of a Tragedy: The Story Behind 'Sociopath Surgeon' Christopher Duntsch (texasobserver.org) 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. 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. But the Medical Board wasn’t designed to be an aggressive enforcer. It was mostly designed to monitor doctors’ licenses and make sure the state’s medical practitioners are keeping up with professional standards. The board’s mandate, spelled out in the Medical Practice Act, recognizes a doctor’s license as a hard-won, valuable credential. Doctors’ rights are to be protected at every step of the process. The board can’t revoke a license without overwhelming evidence, and investigations can take months, with months or years of costly hearings dragging on afterward. The protections make some sense. The Legislature doesn’t want the Medical Board taking a doctor’s license—and livelihood—unnecessarily or based on flimsy or frivolous claims. But the result is that unless a doctor is caught dealing drugs or sexually assaulting patients—or is convicted of a felony—it is difficult to get his or her license revoked. What all this means is that the Texas Legislature has committed the state to a policy of medical deregulation—a free-market system in which doctors can practice as they please with limited government interference. Only their consciences, and those of their fellow doctors, limit them. ... One might think that if a doctor had paralyzed one patient and had another die in the course of a month, it would be someone’s job to figure out why. But as in many other areas in Texas—benzene pollution from hydraulic fracturing sites; ammonium nitrate pileups at fertilizer plants—Martin’s death and Summers’ paralysis fell into a regulatory no man’s land. Once Duntsch left Baylor, he was no longer the hospital’s problem. The only entity that could stop Duntsch from seeing more patients was the Texas Medical Board. But the board is limited in its ability to investigate malpractice. For one thing, it can open a case only if it receives a written complaint—akin to a police department that forbids its officers from investigating criminal activity they witness. With the exception of pain management clinics and anesthesiologists, the board doesn’t have the authority to inspect a doctor, or to start an investigation on its own. ... More than a year had passed since Kellie Martin’s death and the complaint that started it all. In the time between the first complaint to the board, and when Duntsch was finally stopped on June 26, five of his patients were seriously injured and one died. Until the day of the suspension, if you had looked Duntsch up on the Texas Medical Board website, you would have found him a physician in good standing. ...
My grandmother was given a wrong medication after a bone marrow transplant that led to blood clots and her death, my dad chose not to sue because of the 250k cap, but he felt like they killed her due to gross negligence. Weird thing
1) this story is pretty old, I’m surprised you just found this out. , 2) the dude was ridiculously arrogant and delusional, I wouldn’t call it so much as murderer. Every neurosurgeon I know has a god complex. You know why? Doing 100hrs/wk of brain/spinal surgery usually requires a level of confidence and personality that goes with the skill set of something that daunting. There is a fine line that’s pretty discernible to those involved, but these aren’t simple procedures. Spine surgeries have ridiculously bad outcomes even if performed by the most gifted hands. Most are generally done when the risk of non-intervention is usually paralysis or worse itself. I’m not defending the guy, just that it’s not easy to fish someone out when they’re performing very technical tasks that have bad outcomes to begin with. His colleagues and staff would need some time. There’s a reason neurosurgery residency is grueling 120 hr weeks of punishment for 7 years after medical school The irony is that over the last couple of years (everybody in medicine knows this) there has been a corporitization of medicine where the common dude doesn’t realize whose ****ing him and who is spending their nights up, risking their license and personal life for patients. Hint, it’s not the hospitals you think are “allowing someone to get away with it.” I know so many people that have had their careers ruined, been blackmailed, had lies made up about them for because they went against some of these hospital admins who make no joke about it, care about the bottom dollar and patient needs to the effect of the former. Lastly, about litigation—it’s necessary in that it keeps people on their toes. However as one of the most litigious societies you’ll come to realize that a lot of decision making and documentation comes down to protecting oneself from it and has actually led to going from decision making that is most appropriate to decision making that covers someone’s ass and also appropriate. The latter clause takes away. You’ll see how this isn’t the case in Canada. Low litigation and good outcomes. I’ve seen medicine practiced in different states, Texas is unique and they do this well. People will often put their careers on the line to attempt last ditch efforts for patients even though they could suffer the consequences. If your point through all this is a neurosurgeon that was proven to be reckless out of the countless providers that perform countless procedures, billions of orders and visits every year… it’s not the best hill to make your stand. You haven’t even dug into the physician assistant and nurse practitioners practicing medicine without going to medical school (the ones advocating for independent practice and no oversight from a physician—-the internet outrage crowd really hasn’t caught on to the real train wrecks waiting to happen where people in some states are literally “playing doctor”).
The problem is allowing a “murderer” to continue practicing for years. I get the protection and defensive medicine risk of litigations. I like to think there is a way to accomplish both - quickly remove horrible doctor and provide protection for good doctors.
Similar situation with my dad's surgery in 2006. We met with a lawyer and realized it wasn't worth the effort.
did you not read the 1st paragraph ? I explained what it’s like, folks didn’t just get around and go “oh let’s risk our licenses and let this guy practice.” What he was doing was at baseline extremely technical and high morbidity. The truth isn’t as sensational as podcasts labeled “dr death” etc
Have had two friends with botched surgeries at Seton. One surgery was to repair nerve damage in a leg that had atrophied from lack of use and hopefully work to regain full function and mobility once more after months of rehab. Surgeon ended up operating on the wrong leg, severing a nerve in the process that put her from moving around very slowly on a walker, to being in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. This forced her to retire from being a hospital phone operator after 20+ years of service working overnight at Brackenridge Hospital when that was still around. Another close close friend had endured seizures frequently that often damaged her joints, ligaments and muscles in the process. One such bout of serious seizures rendered her to a wheelchair since her muscles and ligaments around her ankles and feet needed rehab. Her PT and OT were able to get her some mobility out of a wheelchair but she had a very painful to watch walking gait that her rehab team failed to help fix when she was able to move around in the brief stints her body would allow. Exploratory surgery was recommended to see what, if anything, could be done to fix her walking gait. Instead, the surgeon, without prior-consultation to this close close friend, cut up both of her Achilles tendons making her rehab journey go back to square 1. If was she was conscious enough to object, she would have but was under anesthesia. She never stood up on her own, much less walked again after that surgery. Eventually she passed away. Not as a result of the surgery but continued degrading health and failures across the board from various healthcare workers in some respects whose responsibility was to look out for her health with meticulous detail. It's hard to expect anyone to be perfect all the time, but some of the **** she went through seemed more like deliberate gross negligence, and less so an overworked overburdened healthcare worker's honest mistakes. Watching what she endured was eye opening with respect to the failures of the healthcare system in the U.S.
The former is indication for severe malpractice. There are usually 4-5 checks in place to prevent this from happening. I would be surprised if there wasn’t a big lawsuit. Also purposely severing both her achiles? That’s not a thing, and if so on purpose why not repair it? I’m not questioning you but these are very odd and illogical scenarios. You should see outcomes in other countries. The training in the US is orders of magnitude more rigorous than anywhere else with the risk of litigation matching it. The healthcare system is flawed because it’s been overrun by administrators and private equity companies that don’t know the first thing about patient care but dictate practices. I don’t have a good answer for a fix, the VA is way worse so socialized medicine would have to be similar to Canada and other countries. A lot of physicians do deserve blame but there’s a reflexive attitude to blame the doctors when in reality they’re the patients biggest advocate.
Both happened. Dunno what else to say. The first instance, the woman with nerve damage in her leg, could sometimes be a bit of a curmudgeon and was known for being particularly stubborn. I found it endearing personally, but I also know she wasn't exactly a favorite among people in the PBX department either, including the boss. Thus she was all but encouraged from her bosses in the PBX department to find employment elsewhere or to simply retire, which she had more than enough savings by then too. After six months of litigation and resistance to the idea, she retired. I don't think anything ever amounted to her case despite your saying it was malpractice. I believe it was malpractice, but that doesn't mean it was punished as such. I mean a best friend of mine in PBX developed colon cancer and was around my age. Opted into long term disability and health insurance annually when choosing benefits. Around this time Ascension which is an umbrella to Seton took over HR and made Human Resources a national hotline and somewhere along that migration of data, his benefits got ****ed. Went a whole summer with stage IV colon cancer without health insurance until I convinced him to ask his parents to opt him into ACA. Still died, but it wasn't until he was in his last two months alive and was a patient at 7th floor Oncology at SMCA that the case manager on the floor noticed the glitch in his paperwork and awarded him past benefit pay upwards of only $2,000. That same friend with the Achilles tendons that were cut was taken to the ER for seizures by myself once to Cedar Park Regional Medical Center. An ER doctor that looked very much like Mark Zuckerberg pulled me to the side to tell me she was faking her seizures. I will never forget that, especially because a month later she went on to pass away from health complications around both her respiratory issues and seizure issues. He discharged her some 5 hours later because no hospital floors outside of the ICU want to deal with a seizure patient and it just so happened the ICU beds at that hospital were full that evening. Also won't forget the after hours paging service Medical Exchange for making it difficult to contact the after hours specialists who happened to give this same friend permission to reach her afterhours but wasn't documented in Medical Exchange's profile of this doctor. Or HEB Pharmacy off I-35 and Wells Branch being especially difficult to get her Rx right even though she'd make sure to have the doctors office send in refill scripts a week in advance with all the proper signatures sent to the appropriate pharmacy. Or when her health insurance coverage switched once she was too old to be on her father's plan and had to instead get on Medicare and Medicaid Part B. Went from home health options to having to go public rehab facilities instead that typically aid children, adolescents and young adults pre-Covid mind you. Her new medical specialists wanted to conduct unnecessary genetic tests and other markers for what was already documented in her medical records from past specialists. Then her seizures got bad enough to the point where it took her hearing. After multiple audiologist appointments in both Austin and San Antonio facilities to see if she was a viable candidate for cochlear implants, she was denied as the reasons for her loss of hearing stemmed from brain damage and not physical defects from the ears themselves. I don't want to make this seem like an attempt to smear the entire healthcare industry. This close close friend's rehab specialists were truly top notch at Easter Seals. Her neurologist at Cedar Park Regional Hospital was absolutely top notch and went to bat for this close close friend of mine multiple times, including the front desk staff. This same doctor was the one that made herself available to be reached by after hours paging services like Medical Exchange but was unable because it wasn't documented in her profile when reaching their phone operators. Another dear friend of hers is a Respiratory Therapist at Dell Children's Hospital. She's a double lung transplant that's had her lungs over 10 years, while still working in a post-Covid world, that lived all the way out in Kyle and would also assist this close friend of mine when she had the time and energy to even though this close close friend lived in Wells Branch, almost an hour away from Kyle. The double lung transplant friend is also married to a Respiratory Therapist that works for Seton and he helped plenty of times too. There are some truly good people that work in the healthcare industry. In fact I would wager, most are good people likely burdened from overwork and are more prone to make mistakes. That said, the events I've described to you really did happen and nothing punitive resulted from it. It's partly what motivates the charming cynicism of shitposting youtube videos between posts such as this. At the end of the day, even if you're right on an argument, it don't mean sh*t if no sufficient action is taken to remedy it. Thus my tendency to advocate for being a politically active citizen at a local level at the very least. If you're just b*tching without taking action to try and change what you're b*tching about, then you're just being a b*tch in my opinion.
Yes, but this wasn't just any Joe complaining about him. Doctors that saw his work or have to fix his mess reported him. Doctors don't just report on other doctors for the heck of it... it must cross a line so bad that their ethical duty pushes them to act. By the time the medical board revoked his license, he injured 33 out of 38 patients. He eventually was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment (trial includes testimonies from doctors that worked with him). Spoiler: These are some of his botched surgeries - wiki [*]Kenneth Fennell, the first patient Duntsch operated on at Baylor Plano, was left with chronic pain after Duntsch operated on the wrong part of his back. Due to the debilitating pain, Fennell later had a second operation by Duntsch to relieve it, and was left paralyzed from the legs down after Duntsch removed a part of his femoral nerve. Fennell required months of rehabilitation to be able to walk with a cane. He was left unable to walk for more than 30 feet or stand for more than a few minutes without having to sit down again.[16] [*][*]Lee Passmore, a Collin County medical investigator, experienced chronic pain and limited mobility after Duntsch cut a ligament which was not normally touched during that particular procedure, misplaced hardware in his spine, placed a screw which kept the hardware in place in an incorrect location in his spine, and stripped the threads so it could not be removed. Even if Duntsch hadn't stripped the threads, he placed the screw in a location that would have caused Passmore to bleed out if it had been removed. Vascular surgeon Mark Hoyle, who assisted with the operation, became so disturbed by Duntsch's actions that at one point he physically restrained him. He later told Duntsch to his face that he was dangerous.[17][8][18] [*][*]Barry Morguloff, the owner of a pool service company, was left with bone fragments in his spinal canal after Duntsch tried to pull a damaged disc out of his back with a grabbing tool. Duntsch initially refused to give Morguloff any pain medicine, claiming Morguloff was a "drug seeker." Morguloff eventually lost most of the function on his left side and required a wheelchair.[8] [*][*]Jerry Summers, a longtime friend of Duntsch's, came to Plano to have two neck vertebrae fused. During the operation, Duntsch removed large amounts of muscle tissue, rendering Summers a quadriplegic. Summers later claimed that he and Duntsch had used cocaine the night before his surgery. Despite passing a drug test, Baylor Plano officials were concerned enough to force Duntsch on leave pending a peer review. While Duntsch was cleared to resume operating while the review was underway, hospital officials asked him to limit himself to minor surgeries until it was complete.[8][19][4][18] Summers remained a quadriplegic for the rest of his life; he died in 2021 of an infection related to complications from the botched operation.[20] [*][*]During his next surgery, Duntsch severed a major artery in patient Kelli Martin's spine during a minor back operation. Duntsch continued operating despite clear signs that Martin was losing massive amounts of blood. He refused to abort the surgery even after a trauma surgeon colleague warned him about the blood loss. He refused to acknowledge anything was wrong, hindering the ICU team's efforts to save her. Martin ultimately bled to death.
