9 years ago
22
Doctor to Be Sentenced for Giving Chemo to Cancer-Free Patients
Prosecutors are seeking a 175-year sentence for a Michigan doctor who intentionally misdiagnosed hundreds of healthy patients with cancer to line his pockets.
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I don't know how he would of done this. There's normally blood work and imaging involved with diagnosing someone with cancer. I wonder if it was more than just him who was involved with this.
Either that, or the outfit he works with is grossly incompetent. Perhaps he knew that they didn't doublecheck sheets and went ahead with the scam because he knew he could get away with it.
Probably was getting a substantial kick-back from a big pharma company for using their cocktail and theirs only, with the money they were getting in for exclusively using that, he could have paid the other employees a bonus of sorts to keep it on the hush hush. The more cocktails used, the more money lining their pockets.
Good guess. I added a related link to an article how it was uncovered. It says he was involved in a kick-back scheme with a local hospice. I hope they get every last of them.
Wow, didn't really want to be right that bad :( It's just a pretty common practice in medicine, if you see your Doctor walking around with a pen with a drug name on it, that Doctor has recently been courted by that pharma company trying to convince them to prescribe their drug over the competitors.
Dont read to much into it if you see doctors with pens or other marked stuff. They use the pens because you get them for free and day to day so many pens get lost in a hospital. You wouldnt buy your own pens if they get lost anyways and you have tons of free ones already lying around. Of course I cant speak for everybody but from my experience (med student and my father is a doctor too) most doctors look carefully into what to prescribe. Not to mention that (at least in Europe) the times of expensive paid "conferences" (read: holidays) and such are mostly over. My dad still remembers getting paid first class flights to conferences in the US but today it's pretty much pay for yourself, even if you give a speech.
That's terrible. I couldn't imagine finding out that.
Scumbag. When this article was posted on Reddit, a user talked about how someone they knew had been falsely diagnosed by this man. Later, when they actually got cancer, their body couldn't handle the chemotherapy. I can't find the thread right now, but the user did say that the person luckily survived.
Thank goodness that user survived. Extraneous usage of chemotherapy is extremely dangerous.
Hell, chemotherapy is dangerous, period. It's just a matter of not dying long enough so that the cancer can die first.
Wow, now that there is a horrible human being. How could he get away with this on his own, though? Shouldn't there be a system in place so that doctors can't just run mad with power?
He didn't do this once, twice or one-hundred times -- he did over five-hundred times! Think about that, he deserves everything that's coming to him.
I have no idea how the doctor got away with it for so long though. Usually many different doctors look after your during chemo. Were they in on it, or just apathetic enough to not notice?
Chemotherapy is not only toxic and dangerous, but exposing precancerous cells to chemotherapy agents may trigger them to develop multidrug resistance early, so any later cancer is more likely to be untreatable. Plus the patient will be weaker due to long lasting damage to the heart, lung, bone marrow, etc., making treatment harder.
I'm not usually a fan of eye for an eye, but in this case I think it would be appropriate to give the guy the same treatment he gave to his patients. Then send him to prison.
I can't even comprehend how you tell over five hundred people that they have cancer when you know that's a lie, much less give those individuals treatment that you will harm them. He lied to and poisoned all of those people, and I hope he spends the rest of his life in jail.
How much of a sociopath do you have to be to do this?
This man has ruined hundreds of lives and caused terror and fear for so many families. He deserves everything that is coming to him and more.
I'm not usually a fan of excessive imprisonment as revenge for what someone did.... but damn is this screwed up. I just can't even imagine a family having to go through what this man put them through.
This is like the opposite of that pharmacist 10 or so years ago who was compounding diluted chemo drugs to pocket the difference. These people are the worst kind of bad guys.
How the hell does one guy get away with this for so long? How is it possible that there aren't multiple people involved in the diagnosis process to verify and determine the patient's condition? This above all does not sit well with me.
Good. Hopefully he will never harm another patient again.
If this guy is just one of many - and it seems entirely plausible - how much does this skew the statistics about cancer?
God, what a terrible person. My grandmother died of cancer, and seeing her go through chemotherapy was absolutely terrible. Just seeing her on it was heartbreaking. I couldn't imagine putting a person who doesn't have cancer through it. Plus, putting somebodies family through that is absolutely despicable. I hope he lives a long life in prison to reflect on what he's done.
How does this happen? Are there no checks or confirming evidence? Surely more than one health professional is involved with these patients.
What's even more spectacular to me is the amount he made from the scam. According to this, the average cost of chemo is $20k, which even if the doctor pocketed half the total cost, he only made about $5 million off this. That seems like such a tiny amount of money to poison an entire neighborhood worth of patients.
I can think of a few ways to make more than that if you have actually no morals, and most of them seem far easier.