Medical Boards and Malicious Prosecution

State legislators task medical boards with the sober duty of protecting the public from physician harm and therefore give medical boards huge latitude to carry out their duties and even to operate in secrecy. Operating in secrecy exists ostensibly to protect those patients making complaints and the public from retaliation by the accused physicians. Because medical boards act in such secrecy, those outside the closed doors never know what really goes on with medical board actions.

So, when some boards choose to not sanction a physician or to give an inappropriately light sentences because they are friends or partners with members of the medical board, nobody knows. Under these circumstances, the public is not protected. Because of the power and secrecy the boards have, they can also bias any evidence unfavorably, especially for the purpose of malicious prosecution. This has become known as lawfare, or weaponization of a legal process.

Recently, with the exposure of what happens in government agencies which are sequestered from the public, the call for transparency in the actions of legislative bodies has grown more vocal. I believe medical boards, like any other legislative body, should be required to be transparent in their actions toward physicians.

As I mentioned in my previous posts on medical boards, I tell my stories to encourage investigative journalists to look behind the closed doors of medical boards. USA articles about all the evil doctors going unsanctioned are not helpful. Megan Ranney and Lawrence Gostin have cautioned state medical boards to rein in their attempts to prevent physicians from making medical decisions. Certainly there are some physicians who are dangerous to patients. However, the political nature of how many medical boards operate is currently hidden under the cloak of secrecy. Tragically, the physician victims of this abuse have little recourse accept to admit to whatever the charges are and try to get back to practice. Today, journalists often express the feeling their role in reporting the news is no longer trusted. May I suggest that a thorough, solid investigation of how medical boards operate behind closed doors would be a good way to regain the trust many journalists feel is missing in their profession today?

If I had come up against the political nature of medical boards only once, it could be coincidence. In my personal experience, politics is not a single, isolated incident with medical boards. I do not know if these kinds of political actions against physicians go on in other state medical boards. However, with all the actions against physicians regarding the Covid vaccinations, I suspect there would be many examples if journalists would start looking for them. Physicians should not lose their licenses for holding opinions outside mainstream protocols.

Little attention is paid to how defenseless physicians are against medical board actions. Dr. Bob Sears describes this effect on physicians well:

"Like many physicians who deviate from the medical “mainstream,” he has undergone investigation by the powers that be. 'Treated like a criminal,' Dr. Sears knows the emotional toll this can take on healthcare professionals. "

In the summer of 1989, I decided to resign from the hospital and clinic where I was working and open my own independent practice. The day I turned in my resignation, I received a phone call from one of the hospital administrators I will call Dr. X. He said he wanted to know if I were planning to leave the area or to remain in town to practice. When I told him I intended to stay in the area, he said he needed to come to my office and talk to me. There were a few things he needed me to understand.

Shortly after this phone call, Dr. X came to my office and took me behind closed doors, told me I couldn’t quit, and that I was fired. He said his hospital and clinic were going to do everything they could to wreck me and my practice. For starters, they were going to keep me on the payroll for 60 days, but not let me practice so my patients would have to go to one of their other doctors. When Dr. X left my office, he gave me one hour to vacate the premises.

Dr. X then put five receptionists to work calling my 160 obstetrical patients to tell them that I had left town, they didn’t know where I went, and that I wasn’t able to practice any more because I couldn’t get liability insurance.

The following day I went to my lawyer. He said North Dakota was a right to work state and what Dr. X was doing was against the law. My lawyer contacted the legal firm representing Dr. X's hospital and clinic. My lawyer told the hospital and clinic’s lawyers that they couldn’t prevent me from practicing. The hospital attorney admitted to my lawyer that he knew this: “I know it’s not legal and I’ll tell them to fix it.”

After I left my lawyer’s office, I made a call to my insurance agent. He told me “You’ve got insurance today. We’ll send you a bill.” After I got my liability insurance, I had hospital privileges, even at Dr. X's hospital. I was open for business with malpractice insurance within 24 hours of being locked out of my office and I didn’t miss a delivery. Only about 5 out of my 160 pregnant patients stayed behind, which is exactly what Dr. X didn’t want.

In the first six months after I left the Dr. X's clinic, a lawyer from Dr. X's law firm sent me two or three letters threatening to report my patient care to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB). In two of the cases, I hadn’t seen the patients at all. In the third case, I assisted a hospital doctor with a delivery and left before the doctor had finished. The hospital lawyer threatened to report me to the NPDB because the patient later found a sponge had been left in her vagina. Once the lawyer understood that the care had been rendered by another doctor in her client's hospital, the charges mysteriously disappeared, not only for me, but also for the other hospital doctor.

It had been well-understood for two decades that this hospital and clinic’s business philosophy has been to capture what they could of the competition, and if that failed, to destroy what they couldn’t rein in. The stories about my leaving town and not having insurance or hospital privileges continued to circulate for months. Over the next eleven years, there were numerous bogus hospital and clinic staff complaints about my care. The doctors knew the complaints were false because not one of the complaints ever appeared in my hospital record. When my attorney requested a copy of my hospital and clinic record in 2000, it was clean.

Dr. X's Many Hats Behind the Scene

By 2000, Dr. X had become the President of the North Dakota Board of Medical Practice (NDBOMP). And by 2000, he had managed to find a felon who had been charged many times with "theft by deception" and had served prison and jail terms for these charges. She was very proud of the fact that she had visited with Dr. X and her own doctor at their hospital and clinic to compose a letter to send to NDBOMP with her signature. That is, under direction from Dr. X, she was willing to file a perjured complaint against me with NDBOMP, a complaint drafted Dr. X and his staff.

Considering the events of 1989 and the turmoil which Dr. X continued to foment over the next decade, Dr. X had major conflicts of interest in participating in the actions NDBOMP took against me in response to the felon's contrived complaint. Despite Dr. X's long effort to put me out of practice, Dr. X did not recuse himself from the NDBOMP actions against me. Indeed, he handled every aspect of the felon's complaint against me. Dr. X knew the complaint in front of NDBOMP was fraudulent. Still, Dr. X headed NDBOMP’s investigative panel in Bismarck where he read the letter he and his colleagues wrote in the name of the felon. Dr. X signed the ex parte and the order for my immediate suspension.

An ethical professional would have had the integrity to recuse himself from any NDBOMP actions. An ethical medical board would have required Dr. X to remove himself from any proceedings involving me. Instead, Dr. X placed himself front and center and manipulated all of the actions against me for his hospital and clinic’s revenge and financial gain.

By controlling the NDBOMP actions against me and signing the orders he did, Dr.X achieved his long-standing goal to put me out of business and capture my 10,000 patients for his hospital and clinic.

With Dr. X's signatures on the ex parte order and the order for my suspension, he also destroyed another hospital where I was the only OB/GYN and head of their OBGYN department. Without me, the OB/GYN department disappeared from this hospital. Without the OB/GYN department, the hospital disappeared. Dr. X's hospital and clinic then bought my primary hospital facility for ten cents on the dollar.

Secret Investigations

NDBOMP prides itself on the secrecy of its investigations. In it’s Winter 2005 issue of the NDBOMP newsletter, The Examiner, the NDBOMP chair said:

“The investigations are confidential. Even the fact that an investigation is underway is confidential information (p. 1).”

As for the secrecy of the investigations, before any formal decisions were rendered by NDBOMP, my name appeared in the front page news about the allegations, but the felon’s name was protected from exposure. Once a complaint is filed against a doctor, a doctor should have the opportunity to address the issues. Any claims made should be supported by reasonable evidence at the time they are made. Medical boards should be required to openly investigate complaints with the doctor and be prevented from secretly coaching people to contrive evidence to support weak or fraudulent claims. NDBOMP’s highly touted secrecy does not serve the truth, justice, or the public.

The extent and depth of the deceptions behind NDBOMP’s “secret” investigations have nothing to do with public safety and much to do with the personal agenda of the people serving on NDBOMP. Secrecy simply allows persons such as Dr. X and the felon to use NDBOMP for their personal gain.

Context and Proportion

There was no proof of the felon's allegations against me. I was being fined $1,000 per day, had no income, and was paying lawyers $1,000 per day to defend me. NDBOMP sent me to Menninger Clinic for one week of rehabilitation, but when I kept telling my doctor there I was innocent, I was very much in the same position as prisoners who are denied parole unless they confess to crimes they haven't committed. While refusing to confess to something I had not done, NDBOMP's Executive Director instructed my Menninger doctor to tell me if I did not confess, my license would be revoked. I was not allowed to talk by phone to anyone, including my lawyer. One week's stay at Menninger turned into two. I was ordered by NDBOMP's Executive Director to fire my lawyers. I soon realized I would be kept there until I confessed to manufactured crimes.

Dozens of people were willing to report the kinds of abuse they had been subjected to by the felon making the complaint against me, but NDBOMP refused to talk to these people. Instead, NDBOMP's Executive Director told my lawyer to stop people from calling him. He wanted to suppress the truth by refusing any evidence in my support.

NDBOMP had worked secretly with the felon for six months to contrive some reason to revoke my license. NDBOMP’s intent, with Dr. X in the driver’s seat, was to shut me down. Yet NDBOMP had made no provision for the care of my patients after serving me with an order to immediately stop practicing medicine. My three patients in labor, one a woman with a high-risk pregnancy, suddenly had no doctor. Many of my patients have told me how awful it was to suddenly have no doctor, even those who were not pregnant at the time. NDBOMP ignored patient safety—their only reason for existence— in their actions towards me and as a result, some of my patients died.

Medical boards have no mandate to protect the rights of doctors or to determine whether the doctor’s responses to allegations are truthful. This allows NDBOMP and medical boards like them to create any false context for a doctor they care to, in secrecy, and with hidden agendas. This serves no one except criminals.

Nevertheless, medical boards are mandated to act without malice. This requires medical boards to keep the complainants as well as themselves, in context. Nowhere are medical boards allowed to act without considering the harm they do to the public—the patients—as a result of any of their actions. Public safety can only be assured when all parties involved, the complainants, the doctor, and the members of the medical board, are held to a standard of strict adherence to context and the law.

NDBOMP seriously endangered the public—including my 10,000 patients—by deliberately removing the felon’s fraud from its context. Indeed, NDBOMP became so invested in the felon’s contrived, fraudulent claims that NDBOMP actually aided and abetted the felon in committing yet another felony.

Consider the Following Violations

I am not an attorney, but as I look over the actions of NDBOMP against me in 2000, it seems clear to me that the following violations played a large part in the board’s actions against me.

Malicious prosecution is a lawsuit based on some ulterior purpose besides the merit of the case. For example, a corporation filing a lawsuit against a business in order to remove competition.

Perjury is the intentional act of falsifying an affirmation to tell the truth in an official proceeding, whether spoken or in writing.

Suborning Perjury is the crime of persuading someone to commit perjury, or lying under oath in a legal proceeding, knowing that the witness will lie.

Extortion is the use of any kind of force or coercion to obtain something.

Exculpatory Evidence is evidence favorable to the defendant. The Director of NDBOMP suppressed exculpatory evidence in my defense by ordering my attorney to stop witnesses from calling him.

Witness Tampering occurs when someone tries to influence a witness to withhold testimony. The Attorney General working with NDBOMP told a witness to my defense that he would have her probation revoked if she testified for me.

Conspiracy is an agreement between two or more people to commit illegal acts to further their goals.

Due Process requires government actors to follow certain procedures before a person may be deprived of liberty or property.

Because of the political nature of actions against physicians, I believe the workings of medical boards should not be allowed to be kept secret. Those who file complaints should be required to state their name publicly. Those on the medical board with ties to the person being investigated should be required to recuse themselves. Medical boards should not be allowed to prevent witnesses from supporting the targeted physician. Felons with a long history of charges of "theft by deception" should be recognized as questionable witnesses. Medical board members should not be allowed to coach the person filing the complaint on how to entrap a physician.

The importance of transparency in the actions of government bodies is getting a lot of attention in the media. It is my belief that until medical boards are required to act openly and transparently, physicians will be vulnerable to many kinds of questionable actions against them.

I believe it's time medical boards stopped hiding behind the cloak of secrecy. Medical boards are no different than other legislative bodies. Their actions should not be protected by secrecy.