The Anti-Doctor
A judge sentenced a coward and lowlife doctor to 45 years in prison recently. He was a hematologist/oncologist who criminally put patients through treatments they didn’t need so he could get rich. The article talks about “stories of brittle bones and fried organs as patients chillingly described the effects of excessive chemotherapy at the hands of Dr. Farid Fata.” And Fata:
..offered no excuses before getting his punishment. Stone-faced all week in court, he repeatedly broke down in loud sobs as he begged for mercy Friday. “I misused my talents, yes, and permitted this sin to enter me because of power and greed,” Fata said. “My quest for power is self-destructive.”
So, he is a coward, too. This bastard pleaded guilty last year to fraud, money laundering and conspiracy so he did a lot of bad stuff. No, there is no mercy for you, Dr Fata.
I am hoping that the combination of him trying to get rich while doing unnecessary treatments was the key to his jail time. Amazingly enough, this is still a slippery slope. Sending doctors to jail should scare us. For example, what if he wasn’t really trying to get rich off this and his excessive treatments were not excessive but a little bit of an outlier? What if he was doing some treatments that were not standard of care now but preliminary studies look good? And what if that made him rich? What if a doctor made a mistake and a patient died? Does she go to jail?
Fata’s case was easy. I am being a devil’s advocate here but I still think we need to be careful about precedents where doctors do jail time especially when the wrong people are in charge of the healthcare system.
Doug !! worry about this in the appropriate case !! this is no slippery slope and there ain’t even a little hill in sight ! each victim giving HIM 1 dose of their chemo would be suitable restitution. He is maybe more culpable than Dr. Mengele ! Mengele was either certifiably insane or deluded by his fanatical beliefs (or both). THIS GUY DID IT KNOWINGLY, CONSCIOUSLY AND FOR GREED! Both deserve the death penalty.
Query: with all the patients involved and all the other doctors they likely had, why was there no other physician who got suspicious ?
Steve I love the quote from C.S. Lewis.
This man is amoral; no different than a financier who designs and sells worthless securities to clients for huge profits. In a society where profit trumps all else this is to be expected, regardless of who is in charge.
As I said to my wife: I’ve been going about this the wrong way.
If it required something like $40,000,000 in fraud to get this guy caught, why haven’t I been committing, I don’t know, maybe $1,000,000 in fraud, and completely evading notice?
I could do that without even misdiagnosing anyone.
I’ve been barking up the wrong tree.
Look up Dr Harold Shipman. I was a medical student in the UK at the time. But you are right. People can spin nothing into something criminal for their own purposes.
First – Dr. Fatah committed crimes against humanity. The judge in sentencing said – “This is a huge, horrific series of criminal acts.” His actions should be scrutinized with all the gravity acuity that the Nuremberg Tribunals considered in trying the Nazi doctors. Do notice that in those tribunals, a third of the doctors received death; a third were acquitted; and a third were imprisoned. Those tribunals should be scrutinized – they were put in place by an alliance seeking to punish a modern, technocratic and bureaucratic expression of evil in action. For evil of the magnitude of Fatah and Gebhardt, Hoven and Mengele, any appeal to mercy for them should be swept away.
To answer clearly by seeming to change the topic – Societies become good or evil depending on the health of their social conscience in caring for the helpless and disadvantaged. Us, here, now – we have little to speak of in the way of our immunity to evil. We are willing to look away in the matter of the helpless and disadvantaged. We talk of healthcare in terms of efficiency and expediency, and shrug off the price to humanity. Will the example of Fatah be used in a path to more control, more practical improvement of healthcare? Certainly. Can it alone be used to frighten people into silence? Of course. Can there be a Kristallnacht? Of course, of course always, there can still be a Kristallnacht.
“And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo – that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.” ― Joyce Carol Oates
“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.” – CS Lewis, the Screwtape Letters
How do we wind up with a Dr. Fatah? We nurture him, we comfort him, we grow him ourselves and then point with shock when he commits the ultimate sin, and GETS CAUGHT.