According to a story from USA Today, despite numerous warning letters sent from the US Food and Drug Administration to the offices of doctors and other medical professionals across the country, many state medical boards take no sort of disciplinary action. The FDA warning notices are sent to doctors following state inspections in which various standards which are intended to protect patients are not being effectively enforced.
Selling Snake Oil
Perhaps one of the most high profile violators is Dr. Benedict Liao, who, as of August 2018, has yet to suffer any consequences for his misbehavior. Dr. Liao has been marketing his own cancer treatment, called Allesgen to desperate patients. The treatment costs $1,800 a month and he has been selling this dubious treatment for years. He has received four FDA warnings, been sued by a patient, had his office raided by federal agents, and has received a colorful array of negative reviews online. Remarkably, even in this dramatic case of rapant criminal activity, the California medical board has done nothing whatsoever.
Dr. Liao is just one of a total of 73 doctors across the country that have received FDA warnings over the past five years and are still actively practicing medicine. Of this group, only a single doctor ever faced any disciplinary recourse from their respective state medical board.
Violations Directly Put Patients in Danger
It would be one thing if the violations that were cited could somehow be dismissed as relatively minor, but this is simply not possible. Violations include similar situations to Dr. Liao, like pressuring patients to take supplements or treatments of dubious quality and safety. Others include fertility centers that fail to test donor sperm and eggs for traces of infectious disease. All of these violations clearly put the lives of patients in danger. Many patients have no clue that they could be going to a clinic that could be putting their lives at risk.
There are a number of problems that allow such clear violations to continue. After all, there is shockingly no official channel for sharing warning letters with state boards. Congress mandated a special database to track malpractice cases, but these letters, which are sent directly to doctors, are not included as part of the system. Some boards hardly check the database at all anyway.
Clearly, a more stringent and foolproof regulatory mechanism is necessary if patients are truly going to be protected and not exploited.
