Neurosurgeon: A Horror Story
According to an article in the Dallas magazine “D”,in its November 2016 issue, Dr. Christopher Duntsch should be known as “Doctor Death.” He is tall, has blue eyes, and before his downfall he was known for his winning manner and extreme confidence. Here is a summary of the long and somewhat meandering article:
Dr. Duntsch received his undergraduate degree from the University of Memphis in 1994 and went to the University of Tennessee Health Science Center for medical school; he also received a doctorate summa cum laude from the St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in 2001. He did his residency at the University of Tennessee, spending a year in surgery and five years in neurosurgery. He was heavily involved in research and was funded by over $3 million in grants as a principal or co-principal investigator. He started two companies based on patents for stem-cell research, one of which companies, Discgenics, is still functioning. The two research scientists who co-founded that company, however, accused him of “taking more credit than he deserves” for their discoveries.
At a birthday party “in 2006 or 2007”, a woman stated (in a later deposition) that Dr. Duntsch ate a blotter of LSD and some prescription painkillers, chased with a quantity of cocaine. After partying all night, it was claimed that he got up to make rounds at the hospital.
Later, a neurosurgeon who was asked to perform corrective surgery on two of Dr. Duntsch’s patients was so disturbed at the results he found that he called his residency program and was told by a Dr. Boop, chairman of the department of neurosurgery at his hospital:
Duntsch had been sent to an impaired physician program when he refused to take a drug test after an anonymous woman called to say she had seen him use cocaine, but he had been allowed to return to finish his residency. Boop also said that Duntsch spent his final year operating as an attending physician, and was not allowed to operate independently.
Dr. Duntsch tried to concentrate on research, but his handling 0f the two companies he created did not assure him of sufficient income to allow him to live in the manner to which he wished to become accustomed (there is a saying which goes: “Cocaine is G-d’s way of telling you that you have too much money.”) Therefore, he decided to go in for clinical work. He sought out employment opportunities, and with the help of a good recommendation from his residency, soon had several offers.
Dr. Duntsch neglected to mention in his resume that there was a small gap in his work at his residency program, which was revealed only much later. One of his patients, Lee Passmore, had been operated on December 30, 2011, very early in the doctor’s career of botched procedures in Dallas. Mr. Passmore was a field agent for the Collin County (Texas) Medical Examiner’s Office. He felt that something was seriously wrong with Dr. Duntsch after he emerged from surgery worse off than when he went in. The article describes what Mr. Passmore discovered:
[He] found a few months that were not accounted for in Duntsch’s educational history. “You don’t get to walk away from two or three years of medical training, in the middle of an internship or a residency, get to take time off and be slotted directly in the position you left in with no questions asked. Maybe that’s how they do it in Tennessee, but according to my training, that’s not how they do it here. Then it just started to all unravel.”
Dr. Duntsch took on employment at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, TX as a neurosurgeon, at the rate of $600,000 a year; under his physician services agreement with Rimlawi and Won’s Minimally Invasive Spine Institute:
Base compensation was $600,000 a year for two years, beginning on June 14, 2011. Duntsch also received 40 percent of all revenue he generated beyond $800,000 each year.
Neurosurgeons make a lot of money for the hospitals at which they operate:
According to Irving-based physician recruitment firm Merritt Hawkins, a single neurosurgeon produced [for] his or her hospital an average revenue of $2.45 million in 2015.
To make a long story short, Dr. Duntsch proceeded to botch nearly every surgery to which he laid his hands, and was thrown out of one hospital after another. A number of his patients died from preventable complications, including one who bled to death in the intensive care unit. Others suffered complications that virtually never occur in neurosurgery, such as esophageal injuries. While it is not unusual for neurosurgical patients to die or suffer serious complications, Dr. Duntsch’s patients virtually all had bad outcomes. The Texas Medical Board took away his license in June 2013, after complaints that went back to early 2012. It wasn’t until the neurosurgeons who were detailed to clean up after him went to the District Attorneys in Dallas County that he was indicted for aggravated assault during surgery in July 2015.
Dr. Duntsch clearly abused drugs and alcohol, and had serious personality problems even before his substance abuse began. The combination of alcohol and cocaine is particularly dangerous because it produces a novel drug in the body, cocaethylene, which has a much longer half life than either of its parent drugs and tends to produce myocardial arrhythmias. The personality defects that Dr. Duntsch had sound like a combination of narcissism, sociopathy, and drug-induced delusions. Oddly, there was no paranoia after the use of cocaine or LSD, which suggests that Dr. Duntsch was incapable of experiencing guilt. His complete denial of guilt and grandiose behavior suggests gross narcissism and/or sociopathy.
The article is enhanced by an interview with the aforementioned Lee Passmore, who is the only one of the patients who has sued Dr. Duntsch who has not settled his case. All those who have settled are prevented by nondisclosure agreements, which are standard in such cases, from discussing the problems that induced them to sue.
I strongly suggest reading the article, which also describes problems with Texas laws on malpractice. For example, it is impossible to sue hospitals in Texas for failure to supervise their physicians unless actual malice can be shown. In addition, malpractice awards are capped at $250,000, an absurdly low figure when a single hospitalization for neurosurgery can be charged out at over three-quarters of a million dollars. I have railed at length against some of these legal problems, not to mention the systems of recommendations which allow physicians to slip through the cracks when moving from one position to another, so I will not elaborate here.
The only shortcomings of the article are a few errors on medical details and some missing information, such as an exact timeline of what happened when in Dr. Duntsch’s erratic career.
I haven’t endorsed many websites, in fact, I have hardly endorsed any. That is about to change.
The Fallacy Files is a website devoted to fallacies, explaining them, helping the reader to avoid them, and thoroughly documenting them in general. In addition to the main files, which describe almost all of the known fallacies used in logical and illogical argumentation as well as advertising, there is a weblog or “blog.”
Here is a quote from Jeremy Bentham, a justly famous philosopher, dates 1748-1842:
Without a popular assembly taking an effective part in the government and publishing its debates, and without free discussion through the medium of the press, there is no demand for fallacies. Fallacy is fraud; and fraud is useless when everything is done by force.
Source: Jeremy Bentham, Bentham’s Handbook of Political Fallacies (Apollo Editions, 1971), p. 246.
Jeremy Bentham is known as the father of utilitarianism, which can be succinctly described as, “The greatest good for the greatest number” or the philosophy of the Star Trek character Spock. John Stuart Mill (dates 1806-1873) was one of his best-known contemporaries; Mill was known as a philosopher and an early proponent of equal rights for women. Mill is also famous, forever fixed in my mind, as having said,
“That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”
and, most importantly,
“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”
(All facts and quotes are from Wikipedia)
Go to tumblr to explain the phenomenon of the “odd behavior” I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago. There you will see many blogs that closely resemble the two who started to follow me, that I didn’t understand before, that is: “doggieselfies” and “catslivepics.”
These two blogs, and many others, are simply blogs by people who are mostly speechless. They can’t fill out their “About” pages because, either they have nothing to say, or they can’t say it. Instead, they prefer to post pictures of dogs and cats, respectively.
I am enlightened: there is nothing really odd about this behavior. They are just extreme examples of people who want to blog but don’t have words, only pictures. So I’m happy that they can read and like to read me, or at least they want to look at my occasional pictures/photographs. THereFore, I will post more pictures.
Here’s a subset of the web you’re sure to enjoy: webcomics, comics that are published on the world wide web, popularly known as the internet. XKCD is surely the most interesting and entertaining of these pictures with a few words thrown in. The very most significant of these is xkcd’s timeline of global climate change, which shows basically what we’re up against in climate and weather for the next few years.
Start with “The Mind of Dan”s blog entry for September 12, 2016, which reprints xkcd’s time series for the global climate change story; at the moment this is the next-to-last entry for the mind of dan, who apparently lives in .ca (Canada?) Dan’s motto is “It’s not enough to bash in heads, you have to bash in minds.” Dan’s mind is a good blog to explore if you have the time, but I want to emphasize xkcd, so you can just go straight to this xkcd entry for the hockey stick.
The take-away that I got from this graphic image is that temperatures were almost as warm as they are now during the “Holocene climate optimum” around 8000-2000 BCE (Before Common Era, previously known as Before Christ.) Unfortunately for us, the temperature is now somewhat warmer than it was then, and temps are rapidly rising above that optimum, way above.
For other fascinating and amusing comics, be sure to explore xkcd and “The Mind of Dan” before you continue on to other entertaining things– if you have time.
FBI Director James Comey has sent a letter today to the Select Committee on Intelligence as well as multiple other Committees of Congress disclosing the existence of additional emails that were apparently found on electronic devices belonging to Anthony Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin (who is one of Hillary Clinton’s major advisers.) Other sources say there may be over a thousand such emails.
The letter is quite vague, not to say opaque, and does not indicate whether these emails contain any material of relevance or significance, nor whether any are classified. Mr. Comey states that he does not know how long it will take to evaluate the emails.
This letter is irritatingly vague and inconclusive, but that did not stop Donald and his supporters from seizing on them as prima facie evidence that Hillary somehow committed a crime by not disclosing them previously.
The truth is that these emails may or may not contain anything of any significance. There is little doubt in partisan minds that this letter revealing existence of these emails is intended to harm Hillary’s campaign.
Unfortunately for the Republicans, most people have already made up their minds. To influence the election, such information should have been revealed at least a month or two earlier. It is almost certainly too late.
According to the New York Times, a review of all the public opinion polls has concluded that Hillary has a 92% chance of winning the election. There is little reason to doubt this conclusion, although no-one will be happy until the votes have been counted.
Exxon-Mobil May Be Going Down the Tubes
A new Huffington Post article explains that Exxon-Mobil is saddled with excessive debt because of mistakes they have made over the last few years, especially when the price of oil was over $100 a barrel. The huge oil company made erroneous bets on trying to tap extremely expensive oil in the Arctic, deep under the Gulf of Mexico, and in the tar sands of Canada– attempts which, even when successful, only made available oil which costs more than it is worth to pump. Now that oil is less than $50 a barrel and likely to remain so for some years, the company is wallowing in red ink. Recently, they lost their top credit rating at Standard and Poor’s, yet they increased their dividend by 2 cents the next day.
The article goes on to detail Exxon-Mobil’s legal fights, including investigations by some state attorneys general into the charge that the company tried to cover up its knowledge of fossil fuel’s role in exacerbating climate change. The company has also failed to invest in alternative energy sources and its CEO has mocked the green energy field.
In sum, Exxon-Mobil is in trouble. In fact, they may be headed the same way as the coal industry, which rates a mention in the article for the bankruptcies of four major coal companies on the heels of China’s 3.7% drop in coal use last year. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
Clarence Thomas Groped Me, Says White Woman
A young lawyer says that in 1999, while she was setting the dinner table at Clarence Thomas’ house preparatory to a dinner party that he was hosting, he grabbed her by the buttocks and made suggestive comments. See this article on the Slate blog “Slatest” for further details.
Thomas naturally denied the accusation, as he could hardly be expected to admit to being a Donald wannabe. The woman’s three former room-mates and her ex-husband confirmed that she had told them privately about the incident at the time that it occurred, not making it a certainty but helping her credibility considerably.
Clarence Thomas is well-known for being the Supreme Court Justice who barely received confirmation from a bitterly divided Senate after Anita Hill made her famous allegations that he had sexually harassed her when she was one of his law clerks. What is not as widely known is that two other women stood ready to testify that they had been recipients of his attentions– but the Judiciary Committee recessed without bothering to call them to testify.
Naturally, Thomas has been the worst Supreme Court Justice in recent memory, failing to ask questions during oral arguments and voting reliably conservative and anti-civil rights in every case. There are no active movements to impeach him or force his resignation on grounds of incompetence.
Harry Hits the Road
quote from the above book, published in 2010 by Harry Hurt III:
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is,” Camus wrote. “The problem is to know whether this refusal can only lead to the destruction of himself and others, whether all rebellion must end in the justification of universal murder, or whether, on the contrary, without laying claim to an innocence that is impossible, it can discover the principle of reasonable culpability.”
NB: this was discovered as a result of the New York Times (NYT) article on “The 282 people Donald Trump has insulted on Twitter”– this quote from that article:
Harry Hurt IIIAUTHOR, “LOST TYCOON: THE MANY LIVES OF DONALD J. TRUMP”
In the past few days, I was informed by email that two different “bloggers” were following my “blog.” They are “doggies that take selfies” or doggieselfies and catslivepics. Both have “About” pages that are just stubs and both have rather generic looking pictures, the first of dogs and their owners and the second just of cats. No text entries. Both blogs have a significant number of pictures, but as I said, those pictures could have come from anywhere.
There are some other “followers” who are somewhat sketchy but this is the first time I have noticed that the blogs of these “followers” are extremely sketchy. What is this? Possibly an advertising effort by wordpress itself, I don’t know. Any ideas?
Here is a personal note about the charges for my spinal surgery: I received a Medicare Explanation of Benefits (EOB) form a few days ago that listed a number of charges from University of California San Francisco. The amount that the hospital charged altogether, not including surgeon’s fees, was $770, 000 approximately. This includes $256,000 for the spinal implant (two titanium rods and screws) and $119,537 for the operating room. In addition, there was a $2264 fee for two units of blood which were administered to me; the blood itself is not charged, but processing, typing and cross-matching was charged.
These fees, which are known as “book” charges, are only charged to patients with no insurance; insurance companies pay only a small percentage of these amounts.
I have complained about astronomical medical prices in the past, so I have little more to say. It just shocks me more when I see it applied to my personal situation.
