Every physician has heard the horror stories.
Stories about doctors who sexually harass patients, bungle surgeries, or ignore complications in patients who then die. And what's more, they can get away with it by taking advantage of lags and gaps in the medical licensing system. By hopping state lines, or having a fistful of licenses issued by different states, they can continue to practice wherever the grass is greenest.
Now, a MedPage Today/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel investigation reveals the scope of the problem: between 2011 and 2016, at least 500 physicians were chastised by one state medical board and yet able to hang their shingles at a new address with a "clean" license.
They slipped through the cracks even though their actions resulted in suspensions, revocation, remedial classes or a portfolio of "letters of concern" that castigate them for misconduct.
The Players
In Colorado, care of a multiple sclerosis patient by Gary Weiss, MD, prompted four medical school physicians to file a complaint with that state's medical board after the woman died.
The Colorado Board and Weiss agreed that he was "permanently inactivating" his license in 2014.
That did not stop him from practicing in Florida, where he has long held a license.
Despite malpractice lawsuits from at least seven patients all accusing him of misdiagnosing multiple sclerosis, it took Florida more than three years to publicly discuss his case.
In New York, breast reconstruction surgeon John Siebert, MD, had sex with a patient, got his license suspended for three years, and was permanently ordered to have a chaperone in the room whenever he was with a female patient. But he wasn't sanctioned by the medical board in Wisconsin, where he also has a license. Instead, he was named to an endowed chair at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
That chair is funded by a billionaire patient who also is a major supporter and campaign contributor of the governor -- who appoints the medical board.
Check Jay Riseman, MD, on the website of the Division of Professional Registration in Missouri, and there are no red flags, no disciplinary history.
But in Illinois, where a medical board official once called Riseman an "imminent danger to the public," the families of his three dead patients remain haunted by what he did. They say they are outraged that he continues to practice medicine.