U.S Doctors In Sex Abuse Scandal

Dr. David Newman

U.S. doctors are far from being saints according to a new report stating more than 2,400 U.S. doctors from all 50 states have been sanctioned for sexually abusing their patients.

What's more shocking is the seeming cloak of secrecy covering this scandal. In most cases, the state medical boards, which oversee physicians, have allowed more than half the sanctioned doctors to keep their licenses even after the accusations of sexual abuse were determined to be true.

In New York City the former head of clinical research at the Mount Sinai hospital emergency room, Dr. David Newman, faced charges of abusing four of his female patients, including one he allegedly drugged while she was in the ER.

Newman pleaded not guilty to charges, and if convicted, he could face up to seven years in prison.

In a different case, Dr. John McGuire sexually assaulted a patient recovering in a private room from the effects of anesthesia. He allegedly lifted the “plaintiff’s gown and placed his ungloved hands on her bare breasts and felt all around looking for ‘swelling.’”

McGuire

In another alleged incident, the lawsuit claims McGuire “rubbed plaintiff’s vagina with an ungloved hand and fingers,” supposedly to check on a rash.

Dr. John McGuire has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is being held in jail on a $3 million bond while his licence has been suspended by the state medical board.

According to John Mittelman, a lawyer representing a group of female patients suing McGuire, “When you have a predator like Dr. McGuire, they’re not thinking like the rest of us, the rest of doctors,” said Mittelman. “They’re concerned only about one thing, and that’s their personal gratification. How else can you explain a doctor having sex with an unconscious patient?”

In a good news/bad news sort of way, even after being convicted of sex crimes and losing their licenses, doctors are often able to reapply to practise again.

Even honoured doctors like Dr. David Mata, once praised on the floor of Congress as a “great humanitarian” and named doctor of the year in Oregon, was accused of 140 counts of sexual abuse of patients.

He pleaded guilty to six counts of sexual acts with patients but was not sentenced to prison and served his probation at home.

I guess no country is perfect when it comes to the practice of medicine.