Dubious Doctors?

Nearly 100,000 Americans are victims of medical errors every year, according to Institute of Medicine. In Colorado, more than 600 doctors were punished by the state over the past 10 years for medical mistakes and a slew of other problems, but most of those doctors are still seeing patients. 

News First Investigative Reporter James Jarman spent two months looking into some of Colorado's questionable doctors and found everything from doctors with drug problems to doctors making huge medical mistakes.  Some of their peers think the medical system's method of weeding the good from the bad is broken.

Susan Miller, administrator for the Colorado Medical Board, says, "Physicians make mistakes. I mean I think we kid ourselves and we kid the public if we try to convince them that physicians never make mistakes. I mean that's just not reality, they're human, we all make mistakes."

In the past 12 months the Medical Board's disciplined about 50 doctors. Two received letters of reprimand after two of their patients died. The board found medical treatments by both physicians "fell below generally accepted standards of medical practice" and constitute "unprofessional conduct."

News First Investigates also obtained records of another doctor found guilty in Maryland of "planning to cause the death" of a healthy infant.

A Maryland Administrative Law Judge recommended the doctor's medical license "be revoked."  Although that state's Medical Board found the doctor's actions "blind, wrongheaded and reprehensible" it suspended his license for six months.  He's now working in Colorado.

"Basically they just kind of say if you met bare minimum standards then you can practice," says Dr. Wilson Pace, a professor at University of Colorado Health Sciences and a consultant for Colorado's Medical Board.

According to Miller, "the reality is the board is supposed to look at what is necessary to protect the public, yet if possible, allow that physician to continue to practice." 

She also says, often times complaints are filed against a doctor, but there are many other medical personnel involved.  So the mistake could be a culmination of factors and it would be unfair to pin all the blame on one person. The Medical Board has two full time investigators, which could make it very difficult to prove who bears all the blame.

News First Investigates found one physician who continues to practice after facing 11 malpractice cases. In one case, he admitted to leaving a stent in a patient's nose for 11 years.

He agreed not to see patients in Colorado anymore, but we tracked him to Chico, California where he's still practicing.

Pace says the medical community needs to crack down on cases like that and handle mistakes like the medical research community. "They would all stop it, instantaneously and say 'You can't do another thing until we all have a chance to say whether this is safe or not.' You know the research community understands that, I think the medical community could do the same thing," Wilson Pace, MD. 

Jennifer Dingman, a Victim's Advocate for the national group "pulseamerica.org" says, "You can't really be expecting perfection, but for some reason our society thinks that's the way it's supposed to be, and it's not."

She says the biggest complaint from victims is that Doctors and Hospitals refuse to give any information to family members after a mistake's been made.  That pushes the victim to seek out an attorney, which Dingman says is something no true victim wants to do. 

Dr. Pace agrees that lack of information pushes victims to file lawsuits, which he says create more problems than they're worth. "We need to find a different system, we need to find a system that tries to help people that get injured in a way that isn't adversarial," Dr. Pace.

To find out if your doctor is licensed, or has faced any disciplinary action, or even malpractice lawsuits, you can click on the database links below:

Disciplined Doctors Database

Colorado Licenses Doctors Database