POLITICIZATION OF THE MARYLAND BOARD OF PHYSICIANS

Politicization of the Maryland Board of Physicians

Few administrative authorities in Maryland are as corrupt as the State’s Board of Physicians. Delegitimized by a cooperative effort with the State’s Attorney General’s Office physician licensing is mere numbers game to them. Utilizing blatantly false evidence in association with paid medical vigilantes medical license revocation has been brought to a high art form in this very blue state. I have been through this process twice. Each time the lies and misrepresentations by the medical board get deeper and the litigation longer. Facts get in the way of their ultimate agenda to sanction as many physicians as they can. Though the State government has provided a level of safeguards for physicians being inspected by the medical board these regulations are generally circumvented. With the help of a judiciary hostile to physician plaintiffs the medical board tends to obtain decisions favorable to them no matter where the evidence lies.

In my first confrontation with the Board of Physicians in 1990 the author was not aware of many facts at the time. Two physicians who came to review the author’s work at a nursing home he managed had perjured themselves in documentation and at an administrative hearing, were not in the same field as the author and had no authority to review him. Worse these facts and others were hidden by an eager Attorney General’s Office managed by J. Joseph Currans trying to be reelected. When the author had an opportunity through Freedom of Information request to see the documents that included these embedded facts he filed a lawsuit. To cover up the unlawfulness of his office Attorney General Curran’s representatives quickly enabled the author to regain his medical license on or about 1995.

In the author’s last go around with this corrupt entity one of the two Board witnesses engaged by this administrative entity sided with this physician as well as the judge in the Office of Administrative Hearings.That was not enough for these cretins who decide physician licensure. Their appointed lawyer, Robert Gilbert from the Attorney General’s office, brought charges knowing that one their expert witnesses completely disagreed with the charging document’s contents. The Board turned around their own judge’s ruling giving the author a 3 year revocation. Then on request for reinstatement, after passing a national test of clinical knowledge, was denied a license. To wound the author further the Board’s director wrote to the author not to reapply again. Corruption in this entity is not to be taken lightly. My case in not unique yet exemplifies a process that destroys careers even when there is minimal or no root cause.

Attorney General’s Office is supposed to bring factual data to the table when taking a case against a physician into an Administrative Hearing. In this physician’s case that did not happen nor was he allowed to defend himself because of quirks in Board Law. Nearly every rule of judicial and Board etiquette was circumvented to obtain a result that never should have ended in the way it did against this physician. Maryland physicians who have been dragged through the mud by the Board and the Attorney General’s Office are aware of the intrinsic

unfairness embedded in the civil prosecution of physicians. Doctors have few rights and even fewer abilities to effectuate a positive outcome when confronted by a Board that has lost sight of its reason for being and a judiciary in the tank for the Board. There is much more to this story including a massive amount of money that went unaccounted for from the author’s nursing home when the State intervened in its function in 1990, 157 patients who were displaced from their long term home, 160 workers who lost their jobs and more. Deceit unparalleled by a sitting Attorney General and misrepresentations to the public to keep his backside in a government post he did not deserve were at the forefront of this malicious prosecution. This story needs to be told in an evidence based manner and it will. Mark Davis, MD. platomd@gmail.com.