Thursday, December 10, 2009

Whore Doctors!

Whore Doctors are a chronic parasitic infestation in the law.  

Growing up I was taught to look up to and view doctors as close to infallible, certainly to be admired and respected.  I'm not sure that I made any distinction in my own mind between various types of doctors or their specialties.   As I've said many times, as a Baby Bad Lawyer, I ended up with a bunch of ambulance chasers and a more cynical crew you can not conjure--they disabused me quickly of this notion.  These lawyers knew doctors like Tiger Woods knows cocktail waitresses.  Epiphanies about the medical professionals were around every corner as I learned my profession.  

From the outset of my career medical reports were thrust into my hands, I was patted on my head and sent to court with the client,  Joe Flabeetz--with the instruction to bring money back to the office.  Since medicine was not taught at the law school, my first task was simply to learn how to read these reports out loud without too much embarassment; learn how to pronounce: myofascitis, spondylolithesis, radiculopathy, and on and on, until these words would trip off my tongue as if I knew what any of it meant.  Slowly I began to figure out what this language meant and calculate the import for our clients and telephone bills. Along the way I took classes and learned a little bit about anatomy and injury.  Eventually, I began to depose doctors and in preparation for depositions I'd immerse myself in medical textbooks, I'd talk to experienced personal injury attorneys, and eventually I learned how to talk to the occasional expert/doctor we would hire.  For the most part the kind of doctor we had working for us, well, let me put it this way--you didn't want to send your mom to him.  



Whore doctors are the men and women of the medical profession who will say anything you want them to say for a buck. These whore doctors work in a variety of specialties and sub-specialties--I first encountered them among the occupational and sports medicine crowd; but there are whore doctors who are "board certified" in orthopedic, neurology, pulmonary, cardiac, oncology, radiology, pathology, gynecology, psychiatry, ear, nose and throat;  and, in a the special circle of hell, there are podiatrists and chiropractors.  Obviously this is not a comprehensive list, since I have had a great deal of experience with mental health professionals who somehow have managed their own alphabet soup of credentials and outrage.

I suppose it makes sense before I go on, to issue a disclaimer--most physicians are NOT whore doctors. And a distinction:  Whore Doctors are usually Bad Experts (a topic for another post), but not synonymous. In point of fact the Whore Doctor is supposed to be a Good Expert--that is believable and persuasive.  As a Whore Doctor might say, "I'm a patient advocate." But can you imagine a Whore Doctor who is also a Bad Expert?  uh, huh, you bet!  A doctor who takes money from the lawyer, puely, to write a report and, or be a witness and is lousy at it--oh, trust me, poke beneath the veneer of most Whore Doctors and the Bad Expert is lurking. Some Whore Doctors are laughably Bad Experts--that any lawyer hires these slimeballs, or having received and reviewed their written reports continues to submit the material and proceed to court with this stuff as their evidence is scandalous on the lawyers. part.


As I've talked, here before, workers' compensation hearings in Our State can result in awards of thousands of dollars for relatively minor injuries based on a percentage of permanent partial impairment.  As a result of so much money flowing around, it's a little like being in a "gentlemen's club" with a large roll of dead presidents--the whore doctors circle around like lap dancers looking for a $20 in the garter. 

This amount of compensation awarded "injured workeers" is determined by what the doctor says in his or her report.  When I first started doing workers' compensaton representation, there was no objective standards by which the industrial administrative court made its decision.  My eyes were opened one afternoon when I was watching hearings where percentage awards were made--a specific whore doctor said so-and-so's injury was worth 7% not two minutes later the same doctor said another guy's injury, the identical injury with identical findings was worth 25%!  The only difference that I could discern was that the second guy was represented by the local BIG FIRM that could pay the big bucks to the whore doctor.  

Eventually reforms reigned in the workers' compensation system, here in Our State with the adoption of the AMA Guides to Disability--still what happens in this system is a-m-a-z-i-n-g.   Gratuities, gifts, cocktails, and meals were/are the order of the day.  In days of yore there was an older woman connected to the scheduling of medical exams and hearings at the workers compensation court--who was remarkable because her invaluable services in greasing the machinery could make the difference in a firm's bottomline--not surprisingly, she was the gratuity queen.  Need Rolling Stone tickets for a sold out show, you could buy them from Ceil', you might even be able to choose your section.  She was the house Madame--on Our State payroll. 

Among the private Whore Doctors there's a board certified ophthalmologist (a medical doctor specializing in diseases of the eyes) who runs offices in all areas throughout Our Home State treating orthopedic and soft tissue injuries--you know, the eyes are connected to the head bone and the head bone is connected to the cervical spine and so on.  There's an OB-Gyn who operates a pain clinic for men and women.  One whore doctor I know resides abroad at his villa in France while his son, an adopted Korean kid (who was never able to pass the "foreign medical student examination," after his graduation from the medical school at the University of Guam)--ran the father's doctor's office submitting all of the provider information, especially the bills on forms his father had pre-signed, that is until the Medicare fraud authorities shut down the operation.


While I have not made a distinction you might think this is a problem for the plaintiff personal injury bar, alone,hardly, the whore doctors on the defense side are equally offensive, if slightly better compensated.  I once took the deposition of a well known "defense" orthopedist whose book lined office had not one discernible medical text--his library consisted of Moody and Dun & Bradstreet investment guides.  There's the "B-reader" a specially "qualified" radiologist certified to interpret x-rays for persons with exposure to asbestos who saw 400 hundred retired steelworkers on a Father's Day visit to see his Dad.  Retired steelworkers lined up and filed through a trailer set up for him  by a personal injury firm, in one door--asbestos claim out the other door, supper with the old man and on to the next town. I could go on and on with examples of greed, rapacity, shoddiness, and utter malpractice--it was and is endless.


Among the Whore Doctors the chiropractors are the most outrageous.  Read the Wikipedia entry to get a sense of how truly strange "a calling" chiropractic is:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic  It would be one thing if Chiropractors saw themselves as providing some sort of purely therapeutic service that was allied to medicine, but truly these men and women think otherwise.  You'd think--okay here's a group of peole not smart enough to get admitted into medical school, as a group they'll be humble, right?  WRONG. Chiropractors are arrogant high-level quacks and they cover their professional tracks with an argot which they use in all seriousness that is inherently absurd and anti-empirical. Until recently Chiropractic was the only area of "medicine" where you could call yourself "doctor" and possess neither a high school or college degree. Chiropractors don't hesitate to offer their opinions on all sorts of ailments having nothing to do with their so-called expertise--the spinal column.  I can't tell you how many times I've encountered chiropractic reports being offered on conditions like knee sprains, carpal tunnel, dermatological, and viral ailments as if these opinions constituted relevant expert opinion.  Shameless whores.

When I talk about chiropractic, friends tell me their stories of this person or that person who was helped by a chiropractor.  I'm sure this happens, likewise I'm guessing that massage, or exercise or rest would have achieved the same result--but, I know of horrifying instances wheere these clowns "adjust," manipulate and crack spines in the presence of herniated discs, and other dangerous arthritic and neurological processes. Chiropractors can be dangerous quacks.  Oh and a word about podiatrists, what college educated young man or woman says to his/herself--I want to be a foot doctor?  I will say this for podiatry versus chiropractic--most podiatrists I've met seemed to have something close to relevant medical expertise in their discipline. 

When I was a Baby Bad Lawyer in the offices of my ambulance chasing senior colleagues, the chiropractors, and the doctors would come around with lunch and cookie trays, bottles of booze, they would throw elaborate parties and give away appliances as door prizes--it was disturbing.  Honestly, even as a youngster, I refused to indulge in this largess--it smelled then and to tell the truth so much of the institutional corruption  in this profession flows through this tainted medicine and science.

I tell myself that I could have made a great living in this sea of sharks, but my dorsal fin didn't grow in early enough or quite in the way it needed to, how I needed it to,--to enable me to gleefully feed on the red meat with the required gusto and zeal.  Maybe it was my false sense of sanitation, I needed to shower way too often after dealing with these sleazoids.  The only thing worse than Whore Doctors--well, there are, let's see.....mmmmmm, lawyers.

5 comments:

  1. Wow--none of this should surprise me, or anyone who knows how much money is riding on these cases, but..wow. Somehow the "parties" you mention at the end are the most disturbing--they seem infernal, like malefactors celebrating their immorality in hell. It almost makes me want to take back my whole spiel about ontological evil. In medical/Shakespearean terms, the law exists to "skin and film the ulcerous place, whilst rank corruption, mining all within, infects unseen."

    I think you're being unfair to sharks, though. These people are true bottom-feeders. They swim in the nether reaches of the moral gene pool.

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  2. Gayle--

    I was trying a case on behalf of a woman who was hurt at work, at the time I had begun to acquire a rep for being a successful courtroom litigator--so other attorneys were sending me their porblem cases. This poor woman, Linda had a Whore Doctor who died--the dead whore doctor's patients ended up with an even worse whore doctor, Dr. Picknose. Picknose lost the treating records for this patient--somehow, I got him to say the "magic words"so that the case didn't die on a motion for Summary Judgment. The otherside would not settle the case with me, they wanted a courtroom victory so they hired Dr. Triangle a then up and coming Whore Defense Doctor. Your experts are required to produce a report laying out what their opinions are and what the opinions are based on--this Dr. Triangle did this in a report that ran page after page detailing prior injuries my client Linda, had allegedly suffered--making it impossible for her to have the injury she claimed. So Dr. Triangle comes into court (very unusual to have your expert "live" in this sort of matter they usually testify via videotape)--and opines very pompously that Linda did not have the claimed injury. Unbeknownst to Dr. Triangle, Linda has read his report and realized that the alleged prior injuries are not hers--somehow Dr. Triangle has input wrong information and attributed injuries to her that apparently occured to some unrelated men working somewhere else. In one instance a claimed injury is attributed to Linda by Dr. Triangle that happened when Linda lived in another country. So on cross-examination I lay into Dr. Triangle, who tries to fluff off the errors in his report as "typos." I said, "Dr. Triangle, you go on for three pages with these "typos" and then you conclude Linda didn't have the claimed injuries as a result of these "typos."
    The jury found for Linda--and afterwards they were astounded at the (lack of) quality of the experts (including Dr. Picknose), one of the jurors rhetorically asked me, "you can pay a doctor to say anything, can't you?" Um, yep.

    Thanks for your elegant comment, Gayle...and I apologize for my abundance of typos and infelicities--which I hope I've finally addressed.

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  3. chiropractic as well as "health food stores" should have benn banned decades ago

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  4. How does an injured worker appeal a bad carrier's whore doctor report? I have this whore claim I had several diseases/diagnosis that never have shown up in any doctor's report and I have never been told I had these diseases. The judge relied on this whore's opinion to rule against me.
    How best to discredit a whore doc's report?

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  5. This to inform you of a person living and working in the United States illegally.

    The names that this person assumes are as follows:

    Gabriela Sanchez (her niece), Karla P. Durazo (her aunt), Patty Durazo (her sister),
    Julieta Sanchez (her aunt), Patty Sanchez (her sister/her niece) Rocio Sanchez (her
    sister), Mayra Viramontes (her cousin), Karen Durazo (her cousin),Kenya Durazo (her
    cousin), Karina Sanchez (her cousin).

    All of the names assumed by her can be substantiated through her facebook account
    which is under the name Gabby Sanchez.


    Her Employer (who is married to Elona Shaw) is: Dr. Larry Stark
    3201 W. Peoria Ave # A-100
    Phoenix, AZ 85029


    Her assumed Social Security # is her Aunt's Soc. Sec. # 611-32-7757 (Karla P.
    Durazo) who actually lives in California.


    She drives a pathfinder with AZ lic. # AHT4587


    Her address is: 2220 W. Mission Ln. #1095 (which is in Larry Starks name /
    Phoenix, AZ 85017 co-signed for)


    SRP Acct # 919-863-000 (which is in Larry Starks name)


    Her Phone # 602-628-3116 (which is in Larry Starks name)


    This young woman makes it easier for other illegals to obtain medications including
    narcotics and evade citizenship tests through the Doctors office that she works in.
    Also supplying them with false identification and documentation.

    I am very concerned about the illegal activities (Document Fraud, Identity Theft,
    Conducting crimes in America) that she is involved in. Please address the above
    issues as soon as possible.






    Concerned Citizen

    ReplyDelete