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cubby

Live Long and Prosper
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-woman-during-surgery/?utm_term=.eb81403d94a2

Duntsch, as described to Dallas magazine by his colleagues, was a confident man, perhaps too confident. He’d make statements like “Everybody’s doing it wrong. I’m the only clean minimally invasive guy in the whole state,” according to fellow surgeon Mark Hoyle.

Hoyle quickly learned this wasn’t true during the first and only surgery he conducted with Duntsch, which became so botched, the incision so pooled with blood, it looked like Duntsch was “fishing in a pond at night, saying he was working by feel, not sight.”

That was a November 2011 surgery on Lee Passmore, which left him a partially broken man. As Goodman wrote:

Lee Passmore can’t feel his feet. His right leg is as stiff as his pressed blue jeans, and when he walks, he appears to use his hips to heave it forward. He also vibrates — his chest shakes, his right hand jitters.

Hoyle canceled the remaining operations the two had planned together and refused to work with Duntsch ever again.

Now, no one will.

On Tuesday, after just four hours of deliberation, a Dallas County jury convicted Duntsch of aggravated assault for deliberately maiming Efurd. According to the Dallas Morning News, he faces life in prison.

Police originally accused Duntsch of causing the death of two patients and crippling four others between July 2012 and June 2013. In July 2015, he was arrested on five aggravated assault charges, but prosecutors eventually chose to focus solely on Efurd.

But there may have been many more. As Matt Goodman wrote in the Dallas magazine article that gave Duntsch the chilling nickname Dr. Death:

There was Kellie Martin, who died from massive blood loss after a surgery at Baylor Plano. There was Floella Brown, whose sliced vertebral artery triggered the stroke that killed her at Dallas Medical Center. There was Duntsch’s childhood friend, Jerry Summers, who woke up from a procedure unable to move his arms and legs. There was a dissection of one patient’s esophagus, and screws that an indictment labeled “far too long” that caused significant blood loss in another patient. One surgeon described these as “never events.” They shouldn’t ever happen in someone’s entire career. And yet they occurred in Duntsch’s operating rooms over a period of just two years.

Somehow, though, many of these were passed off as accidents, random mistakes. His medical license wouldn’t be suspended until 2013. Lawsuits besieged him; almost everyone quickly settled after signing nondisclosure agreements. Bizarre as that might be, it’s only half as strange as the conviction that ended up sticking.

“I cannot recall a physician being indicted for aggravated assault for acts committed during surgery,” Toby Shook, a Dallas defense attorney who spent 23 years working as a Dallas County prosecutor, told the magazine. “And not just Dallas County — I don’t recall hearing about it anywhere.”

What Duntsch’s motive might have been is anyone’s guess. Girlfriends and friends (or, more accurately, ex-girlfriends and former friends) relayed to Goodman stories of abuse and a social life (which often allegedly blurred into his work life) loaded with bottles of vodka, mounds of cocaine and sheets of LSD.

He reportedly behaved erratically. In a particularly long, rambling email he sent to one of his employees, which was published by the Dallas Morning News, the doctor sounded delusional.

In one excerpt, he compared himself to both God and Satan:

Anyone close to me thinks that I likely am something between god, Einstein and the antichrist. Because how can I do anything I want and cross every discipline boundary like its a playground and never ever lose. But unfortunately, despite the fact I am winning it is not happening fast enough.

In another, he announced plans to become a murderer:

You, my child, are the only one between me and the other side. I am ready to leave the love and kindness and goodness and patience that I mix with everything else that I am and become a cold blooded killer.

Whatever his motive, his alleged victims may have finally found peace. In a taped interview with the Dallas Morning News, 45-year-old Philip Mayfield, who awoke from a surgery paralyzed, said, “I am very well pleased that he will remain in jail and that justice will eventually be served for the crimes he committed.”
 
I saw another report which said the twin
Brothers' corpses didn't show signs of barbiturate withdrawal, which is pretty violent and evident. More likely they both OD'd.
Either way., all very pathetic and gruesome.
I remember watching the movie "Dead Ringers" one July 4th. My mother recommended it. I was so freaked out! Gynecological nightmare! And I'm not easily scared. After watching the movie, it was sunset and i decided to walk to the nearby cliffs and watch the town fireworks. It was very family friendly, I figured my fave holiday would,comfort me. Nope, I felt totally paranoid.
I knew it was silly, but fled home and huddled in a blanket. Me, a person who took long solitary walks every night! My husband came home about 9pm and I wanted a HUG. He was upset and sort of impatient. I was always the CALM one, never scared.
He couldn't believe I was so freaked by a movie.
I'll never watch that movie again.

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This guy isn't the only one that needs to be criminally investigated. How was a surgeon with this many incidents permitted to still practice? The hospital he worked for/with needs to be investigated. Is there no oversight whatsoever in this world? No watchdogs in the profession? A doctor can just do whatever they fuck they want, botch surgery after surgery after surgery, and be permitted to still practice?

Something more needs to be done. Clearly the world of neurosurgery in Dallas is inept and broken if it permits something like this to occur to sooooo many people.

How many surgeries were performed after the one on efurd i wonder? He shoulda been put on some sort of probationary status, suspended from operating, until investigations were completed after incident #1. And especially in a case where another doctor was able to see first hand how he butchered somebody? Absurd.

What responsibility to these medical centers/hospitals he performed surgeries at have i wonder? Are victims only able to sue him? I hope not, since #1 he's not the only person to blame and #2, can this one doc alone pay up for the wide array of victims who deserve money out of this.
 
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At one point Dr. Henderson sent me a tape of a conversation he had with the main Medical Board investigator assigned to Duntsch’s case. The conversation took place in January 2013, after it had become clear that Duntsch would practice until someone stopped him, six months before anyone actually did. On the tape, Henderson demands to know why Duntsch is still practicing.

The investigator, Maria Lopez, lets him yell. When she responds, she’s quiet.

“Sometimes we know that someone’s bad, but when it comes to taking them to a hearing and proving it to where we can actually do some disciplinary action, it takes time of gathering evidence. … Unfortunately, sometimes it takes longer than we want.”

What Henderson took from this, he told me, is that “we’re dealing with people who don’t do the job they are hired to do.”

But it’s more complicated than that. Before we ask if the board does its job, we have to ask what is the job the Legislature assigned to the board, and what resources the board gets to do that job.

Texas’ number of license applications has grown every year since 2003, when medical malpractice damage caps passed. Every year the board is both overseeing many more doctors and bringing in more money. But it doesn’t get to keep much of it: In fiscal year 2013, the board sent almost $40 million to the state’s General Revenue fund, of which it got about $11 million back. (Like other state licensing agencies—the Pharmacy Board, the Nurse Practitioner Board—the Medical Board operates at a surplus for the state.)

Public Citizen concluded that the board moves slowly because it’s understaffed and underfunded. But when I talked to Medical Board spokesperson Megan Goode about this, she said Public Citizen had it wrong—that the board isn’t underfunded at all. Things were rough during the state budget crisis in 2011, but now hiring is back up to normal.

The problem, she said, isn’t staff. In an official statement, she wrote, “The way the law is currently written, with a high bar of evidence for the board to meet, the process can take time so that the board can build a solid case. It would clearly be a policy decision for the Legislature to consider whether the process or the standards for evidence required for a temporary suspension need to change.”

Leigh Hopper, formerly the Medical Board spokesperson, put it more bluntly. “You could have a Medical Board that’s the size of the [Texas Department of Public Safety],” she said, “but the state doesn’t want that. It’s more or less satisfied with the way that things work.”

We have to consider the uncomfortable possibility that Christopher Duntsch is to the medical system what the recent West explosion was to the fertilizer industry—a regrettable tragedy, but the price of living in a free-market system. And that with Duntsch, as with other bad doctors, the system worked exactly as it was designed to.

https://www.texasobserver.org/anatomy-tragedy/
 
I guess writing something about limiting their practice into those regs would just be a bridge too far. :punch: How infuriating. Teachers, cops, etc. are all subject to at least temporary suspension but not these fucking doctors.
 
A narcissist, delusional auto mechanic fueled by vodka, cocaine and "sheets of LSD" would be bad enough, but this guy was a brain surgeon. Zero room for mistakes. What a nightmare.
 
This is scary and i don’t sign for donor card because i have trust issues with people that a power somewhat like Gods.
 
This is scary and i don’t sign for donor card because i have trust issues with people that a power somewhat like Gods.
I signed mine... I doubt I'll care very much what they do with me once I'm at organ farming levels of health.
 
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