Seriously - some doctors got C's and they still get to be doctors! Today, we'll talk about Dr. Christopher Duntsch, who is a liar and a fraud and hurt A LOT of people doing surgery that he was not qualified to do.
Seriously - some doctors got C's and they still get to be doctors! Today, we'll talk about Dr. Christopher Duntsch, who is a liar and a fraud and hurt A LOT of people doing surgery that he was not qualified to do.
Taylor: My family left this morning for Puerto Rico
>> Taylor: In the matter of the people of State of California vs. Orenthal James Simpson, case number BA097.
>> Farz: And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you.
>> Taylor: Boom.
>> Farz: Taylor, we are here and we are live in the flesh. That's a weird way to say it. How you doing?
>> Taylor: Good. Good, good, good, good, good. We were just chatting. My family left this morning. They're probably landed already in Puerto Rico. They're gonna have an awesome time. And I'm here by myself for many, many days. I took. I'm taking vacation just to clean my house and paint and do things. And I'm very excited. I'm gonna paint like a hallway, a dark green. I'm gonna do a bunch of touch ups. I'm just gonna be organizing and cleaning and I've already thrown away and given away a bunch of stuff and it's all good. All good news.
>> Farz: Knowing. Knowing how productive you are, Taylor, when you have children, a husband, a career to juggle. I can't even imagine. You are probably wanting to just like build a house or something. I have no idea.
>> Taylor: I can tell you that my 3D printing queue is full. I already have your birthday present done, but I might want to add one more thing. So I have to like, consider adding one more thing. But I've made you some really fun stuff and you're going to be like, oh my God, I love the stuff that you made me. I told Juan I wish that everyone had two birthdays because that's how much I love 3D printing.
>> Farz: You gifts. Rachel has been in the market for a 3D printer, so she will most likely be reaching out to you to get your recommendations.
>> Taylor: Please, please, I will. I'm going to throw in some stuff for her as well in your birthday present. And I'm very excited to send it to you. I'm like, can I send it now? And I'm like, no, calm down. I'm going to send it to you closer to your birthday. I literally have like boxes of gifts that I've shoved under my bed because for birthdays that are like in September, in November, stop it. But I can't help it. And so like, like last night I started a print that was like eight hours and it messed up and I was so mad. But now I have all this time where I can print stuff overnight and all that stuff. So anyway, lots to come in my 3D printing adventures.
>> Farz: You are the most productive person I think I know.
Taylor: I'm going to be covering a doctor and a surgeon
Well, sweet. You want to go ahead and introduce us? Yeah.
>> Taylor: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Dooms to fail. We bring you historical disasters and failures. And today we're going to hear from Fars. I'm Taylor, and I'm going to hear a story Fars is going to tell to me.
>> Farz: Yes, I'm going to tell a story. I learned in the process of researching my topic that apparently there was like, a peacock show about this topic that Alec Baldwin was in, like, in 2022 or 2023 or something. So y' all actually might be familiar with this. I didn't know it existed. I listened to this random podcast by Wondery and they brought up this topic. I was like, this can't be real. This can't be real. Like, you know what it's like every now and then when you find a topic and you're like, I have to get to the bottom of this.
>> Taylor: Like, what have we done? Yeah, yeah.
>> Farz: What. What h*** have we wrought on ourselves? So that's the flavor of this.
>> Taylor: I can't think of what it would be. I feel like I. I don't. I don't know. I definitely didn't watch that show because it doesn't come. It doesn't sound familiar. So tell me more.
>> Farz: Yeah, so I'm going to be covering a doctor who and a surgeon. He's a. Whatever. He has the unique distinction of being the first physician in the US In U. S. History to be convicted of aggravated assault for actions he took while performing surgery on somebody.
>> Taylor: Was it the spinal surgeon guy?
>> Farz: You do know it.
>> Taylor: I do. I listen to the doctor Death about him. But tell me more because it's so good and so crazy.
>> Farz: That was what I listened to. Yeah, I should have paid for. So here's the thing. You only get one episode when you find that podcast, the Dr. Death one, and you got to pay to get access to the rest of them. And I haven't paid. I will because I think the topic's worth actually going into because they're going to do it a lot more justice than I will because they're going to interview people and stuff like that. But if you don't want to pay for it, listen to this, because I'm covered. Soup to nuts.
>> Taylor: I can't wait to talk about it, because it's wild.
>> Farz: Yeah, it's incredible. I. I re. Read through everything here multiple times. And also it's really fun because you're like, how. How did this. Like, how is this possible? Like, all that stuff? So it's. It's a lot to get into.
>> Taylor: It's also like a accountability. Like, you trust people like Doctors and priests and, you know, they don't get fired the way they should be. They get moved around.
>> Farz: Yeah, I'm going to talk about that in detail, actually. So as a starting point, I'm just going to preface all this by saying that this guy, this doctor, he was found guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum 30 years to be served before he's eligible for role. So we'll start at the end there by just framing it. I'm telling you that because it'll be helpful to understand how serious his punishment was when I go into, like, what he actually did. Because you'll. It almost sounds like I'm making stuff up, but I'm not. Like, it's crazy when he gets people.
>> Taylor: No, totally. And it's also like a place where, like, you know, when. When you go into surgery, you are as vulnerable as possible.
>> Farz: Yes, yes.
>> Taylor: To whatever that guy decides to do, you know?
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: So it is. It is obviously very, very scary.
This is really an indictment of the US Medical system in general
Yeah.
>> Farz: So that you touched on one piece of this. So part of this is just a really fascinating story about, like, an insane person who happened to become a doctor. The other part of it is really like an indictment of the US Medical system in general, namely the deference that we give doctors and the kind of, like, the status that they hold in our society. And also, from a slight rant perspective, I looked this up. Did you know that each neurosurgeon her. In a hospital is generally expected to generate around $3.4 million in revenue for that hospital?
>> Taylor: Ew.
>> Farz: Right.
>> Taylor: That, like, shouldn't be part of their metric. Yeah.
>> Farz: You had the exact reaction I had when I looked this up, because I was like, I understand that hospitals have to make money and things. Money has to be made so that things can move and happen. But also, that's gross. I don't want. I don't want a head of finance to be the one determining whether this person should be here doing his thing or not. That's not the right person for that job.
>> Taylor: Ew. Not at all. I did see a funny. It's recording this on July 5th. And I did see a funny post last night of a guy who was like the town hand surgeon on call on 4th of July, just being like, oh, like he's gonna have a job. A very busy night on the fourth of July, trying to reattach fingers of idiots.
>> Farz: But I bring that up because kind of the deference to doctors and also the sheer roi math of hospitaling applied here. And it's kind of how we ended up in a situation where this guy was able to do what he was doing to all these people. So that's it. The guy recovering, his name is Christopher Dunch. Dr. Dunch, we'll call him going forward. He was born in 1971, so he's currently 55 years old. That's the only reason why that's relevant. He grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. He's not from there, but he grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. And he pursued a career in medicine with like a tremendous amount of credentialing, which is how he was able to kind of skirt things later on in his life. He had a medical degree and a PhD. It was a dual track kind of medical degree, PhD thing going on at the University of Tennessee's Health Science Center. He also had a doctorate in microbiology from St. Jude, which he claimed to have graduated magna c** laude from, which he didn't because the school didn't have microbiology program when he was there. So it didn't happen.
>> Taylor: Check your facts. If you're lying, I don't know, but I guess no one cares.
>> Farz: But also it's like he did have an MD and a PhD. It's like, why? It's like, why I'm also an astronaut. Like, why make it up? Like, who cares? Just move on with your life. Right?
>> Taylor: Right. Like, why add that lie for no reason? You're right.
>> Farz: He completed a five year neurosurgery residency, a minimally invasive spinal surgery fellowship as well. And he, he was licensed the time to practice medicine both in Tennessee and in Texas. He had the required amount of actual surgical experience. And his resume was apparently 12 pages, single spaced. And anybody who would look at this guy's resume, seeing where he came from and what he did, was like, this is a superstar. Like, this is the best of the best of the best. Basically, that was kind of how he came across. One bit of detail worth calling out is that for a neurosurgeon to complete a residency program and to be able to perform surgeries on their own, they have to have completed one, a minimum of 1,000 operations. During that training, Dr. Dunch performed less. Less than a hundred. We don't know exactly how many, but less than a hundred.
>> Taylor: So I think it's interesting and I'm going to be very chatty probably, but I think it's interesting because, like, similarly, I've been watching obviously a lot of like, just like in the background, a lot of like the Green Dot aviation, like plane crash videos and such, like we do, but they say like, this Pilot has this many hours and I don't really know what that means. You know, like, I'm like, I don't know, is 10,000 hours good? Is it five? Is how long is my flight? Six hours of the most. Like that ends up feels like a lot. So I feel like I don't really know what that means.
>> Farz: I think, I think it's mostly just the idea. I mean I was literally just watching the Pit earlier today and I think. And what I was thinking about was like, with enough exposure to anything, you're going to see all the different variations of it, you know, like one day, slow, one day. So I assume that you just have to span it out across a very long period of time so you get as much exposure as possible. Yeah, that's kind of the idea.
A neurosurgeon at the University of Tennessee used cocaine during residency
So I mentioned that the a requirement to be board certified as a neurosurgeon and to graduate a residency program is to have this thousand operations under your belt. So how did he skirt by? And this is where it gets messed up and corrupt and why it's gross to everybody involved.
>> Taylor: He.
>> Farz: While he was in his residency, he was also doing a ton of research projects and also managing the University of Tennessee's Health Science Center's tissue bank. As part of that assignment, he was able to secure around $3 million in state and federal research grants. So again, he was a profit center for this part of the university. He made the university look really good from like a public institution perspective. Yeah, in his fourth year of residency. So a year before he's supposed to graduate, there was an anonymous complaint that he had used cocaine while he was on duty. Hey, that, that should have been like a huge red flag. That should have been a huge issue. Especially because in theory he's also supposed to be performing surgeries during this time as part of his residency program. At the time they were like, this guy is bringing in a ton of cash from his Granson fellowship stuff and he's mostly spending his time in a lab coat and he's not in scrubs anyways. He's doing research projects. He's not really operating on people that much. And if we were to do anything about this, it would be bad for us reputationally. Like we would be taking kind of like a end stage neurosurgeon ready to go out into, into his career and saying we messed this up really badly. So let's just not address this in any way that's public by just not doing anything a thousand percent.
>> Taylor: And that's what they do to priests, right?
>> Farz: Yes, Exactly. Exact same concept.
>> Taylor: Call the police. I don't know. I don't know.
>> Farz: So the administration knew that he lacked the required 1,000 operations to complete his residency, but they rubber stamped his, his credentials. Anyways, I'm going to talk about that later on because things aren't that much different today than they were back then. I'll explain why that is.
Dr. Duntsch performed several surgeries that resulted in death or maiming
>> Taylor: Well, I mean like, maybe I'm going to say this like six times, but like some doctors get seized. Yeah. You can still like be a doctor and graduated low.
>> Farz: It's true.
>> Taylor: Can I see a transcript? Like, I don't know. I want to know more about what you got in surgery.
>> Farz: The key thing about that is that in medical school, the ones who did poorly are the ones who do not get accepted into high profile residencies like cardiac, vascular or neurosurgery.
>> Taylor: That makes me feel a bit better. So like, maybe they're like, they're gonna operate on my elbow but not my, like her heart.
>> Farz: No, most the Cs are mostly going to become family physicians. Right? Like that's they'll tell you to drink Gatorade into a rest, like that's their job if you get seasoned medical school.
>> Taylor: So I'm laughing like I'm qualified at all to be even a D level doctor. But like, yes, I get what you're saying.
>> Farz: Same page. Yeah. So he graduates in 2010, and by 2011 he's moved to Dallas, Texas to kind of set up shop. He joined Baylor Regional Medical center in Plano. I'll refer to that as Baylor Plano. Going forward as a staff spine surgeon. And there is going to be a distinction about being a staff surgeon versus a surgeon who has privileges to a hospital. There's a distinction there that's worth calling out. And I'll get to that later on in this. Okay, so at Baylor, he performed several surgeries that resulted in the death or maiming of his patients. I'm going to read off several here. One, Kenneth Fennell, who had surgery performed on the wrong part of his back and ended up waking up with paralyzed legs. You have Lee Passmore, who had surgical hardware installed in the wrong part of his spine. And then later on, as Dr. Duntsch was working on him, he ended up stripping some of the threads on the screws so they weren't able to remove and reposition or replace the wrongly placed hardware anyways. And Lee also nearly bled to death in the operation. There was a vascular surgeon in there with him, this guy named Mark Hoyle, who physically removed Dr. Dunch from hacking his way through this guy. He was bleeding to death. So that's bad flavor.
>> Taylor: It feels very, Like, bare minimum to be in the right spot.
>> Farz: You would think so. So there's gonna be several things that keep coming up over and over again. One is that he keeps cutting major blood articles, and the others, he keeps operating in the wrong part. Part of me wonders if he just is, like, reading the X rays backwards, you know? Like, I just.
>> Taylor: It's just. That's just wild because, like, I feel like in surgery is like, okay, my mom just had surgery. So I'm just, like, using this as an example. But, like, the doctor was literally like, let me write on the side of your body what side we're doing this on. You know, it's just I'm gonna write. I'm gonna write with a Sharpie and, like, I've heard that joke before, but, like, it's true. They do it like you're in the thing, and let's just make sure while you're awake and while we're all awake that we circle the spot that we're going to do, and we agree on it, and then we move on, you know? And I'm like, that's the bare minimum.
>> Farz: Was there a guy one time who had to have, like, a leg amputated because of diabetes or something, and they cut off the wrong leg and then I think so.
>> Taylor: I feel like. Yes. Yeah, exactly.
>> Farz: Rounding out this list from Baylor Plano, you have Jerry Summers, who needed to have two of his neck vertebrae fused. Dr. Duntsch accidentally sliced to an artery. Like I said, it's going to be a recurring theme here. This resulted in Jerry losing about a fifth of his total blood volume. He lost 10x more blood than a typical person would in this surgery.
>> Taylor: Oh, my gosh.
>> Farz: So in the process of trying to stop the bleeding, Dr. Duntsch packed the area with a ton of clotting agent called gel foam, which. Which compressed the spinal cord and rendered Jerry a quadriplegic for life. But the good news there is his life didn't actually last that long because he died within, like, the next few years because of complications due to his quadriplegia. So there you go.
>> Taylor: Who is that good news for?
>> Farz: I don't know. I'm just trying to make it bite.
Dr. Dutch allegedly severed an artery during Kelly Martin's spinal surgery
Then you have a woman named Kelly Martin during her decompression operation, which is described as literally the simplest type of spinal surgery you can do, which none of it sounds that simple, but still.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Dr. Dutch again severed an artery, and he apparently kept Going even as a trauma surgeon and the anesthesiologist. Anesthesiologist, whatever. You know what I'm saying?
>> Taylor: Anesthesiologist. Great job. You make so much money.
>> Farz: They. They were pointing out that she was losing way too much blood. Apparently, when she woke up from surgery, she just started screaming and clawing at her legs until they had to put her. Her down again, and then she would, later on that night, bleed death. So.
>> Taylor: Well, that's one of the worst ways
>> Farz: to go pretty bad. Yeah. Team that. So I've always had this theory. I've always had back pain, and I've always thought to myself, like, this is one of those pains that's worth enduring for the rest of your life because you just don't want to change. Like, the way it's designed is probably the way it should be, and you should learn to, like, endure some of that.
>> Taylor: It's just because if it gets. If you it up, like. Like right now, I'm wearing an arm brace. My arm hurts so bad. Like, I have something I think pulled a muscle nerve or something or whatever. But, like, yeah, no, the thought of having to, like, have surgery, recover from it, and the chances of it being up and, like, all the things, like, you would never be the same.
>> Farz: It's the most important part of your body. Like, that's the thing. It's like. It's like. It's where your brain connects to everything. It's where all the nerve endings kind of tangle up there. Like, it's. It's. It sounds rough. I would never want to have back surgery. I hope I never have to knock on wood. So it was around this time that Baylor was like, we got a problem. Apparently, firing a surgeon. Again, he was a staff surgeon is kind of a big deal, and you can't just do it willy nilly again. It's all kind of tied to, like, reputation. Like, well, this guy's a big chip. That's. That's what all this has to do with.
>> Taylor: It's like, so many of those things were like, I'm so sorry to interrupt. Like, in, like, businesses where they were like, well, if we. If we punish our sexual predators, then, like, people know we had them. And you're like, or you could be a company that's like, hey, when I see it, I cut it. I cut it. Cut it out. You're like, that's what you're supposed to do, you know? Like, I feel like your reputation would be. For me, I'd be more. I'd be more likely to Go to a place where they're like, okay, we saw someone doing something wrong and we fired them rather than, like, not. I don't know.
>> Farz: Yeah. You can't disentangle the growing sentiment in the US around, like, against institutions with, like, stuff like this. Right. Like, there's a reason why we feel the way we feel.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: So in this case, Baylor decided they were going to basically just bench him while they underwent a peer review of his performance. It was obviously not going to go well. And so I literally just described several. Several other surgeons who had to, like, tear him away from patients to stop them from hacking these people up. So it also went and found this, like, Reddit group of doctors who either went through residency with him or worked with him directly. Like, this guy was a nightmare. Like, we would have things happen and the people on staff would say, call anybody but Dr. Duntsch. Like, he was. He didn't have a good enough reputation. And so it was widely believed the peer review would come bad. They would have to fire him anyways. So in exchange for not having to fire him, they allowed Dr. Duntsch to resign and Baylor would not say anything publicly. They would not acknowledge any wrongdoing publicly because, A, it was going to look bad to them that they hired this guy in the first place. B, it would open themselves up to liability lawsuits for the people that he hacked to death, essentially.
>> Taylor: Jesus Christ.
>> Farz: That's important. That's an important detail. Because. Because he was a staff surgeon at Baylor, if they had fired him, he would have gone on a national registry that any hospital could check when they're doing hiring, like a background check and see that this guy was fired for cause and obviously avoid hiring him again. So.
>> Taylor: Which seems like, good.
>> Farz: They should have done. It's what they should have done.
>> Taylor: Why? Tell me why.
>> Farz: Yeah, they let them just. They let him just, like, resign and walk away.
Dr. Duncia's second act only lasted a week at Baylor
So this is the part where I circle back on the staff surgeon versus having pledges at a hospital, because the incentives are very different between the two. In this case, as a staff surgeon, a hospital has to care about kind of the optics of all the things that disgruntled employee could potentially do for surgical privileges. The hospital still wants the revenue, but they're not willing to stick their necks out for someone who's just there to use their facility. They're not billing out the entire surgery. They're billing out, like, the use of their facilities for a staff surgeon, and then the surgeon will then bill out his services separately. So it's like a very different revenue model than having someone on staff versus being a public having hospital privileges somewhere. Which is why Dr. Duncia's second act only lasted a week. Because they didn't have to go through all this crap the Baylor had to go through. After he left Baylor Plano, he ends up with surgical privileges to Dallas Medical center. And he only lasted two surgeries there before they're like, no, no, no, we're not doing this at all. Like, we're totally over this immediately. His first was a woman named Floella Brown. He yet again severed her vertebral. Vertebral artery. Wow, that's a tough word. Vertebral artery. This is the same thing he's done over and over again. All the other ones I mentioned about people bleeding out. Like, that's because he did this exact same thing. So in the process, she lost a ton of blood, obviously, and she had a stroke while she was suffering and dying in a room. Post operation, he was also scheduling surgery for a woman named Mary Eford. Apparently the hospital kept trying to get him to focus on Brown, or the very least transfer her out of his care instead of worrying about Mary's surgery. At that time, Mary's surgery was going to be all life. She could do it then or she could do it later. Woman's screaming to death and, like, having strokes from blood loss. And he's just like, whatever, I'm moving on with my day. At one point, he proposed performing a cran craniotomy on Floella Brown, which is brain surgery. Like, they are going to do a. Put a hole in your brain later in your. In your skull. So it is. It is serious. But he obviously wasn't a board certified. Well, he wasn't a board certified really anything. But he definitely wasn't a board certified brain surgeon, nor was this hospital equipped to do brain surgeries in. So eventually, after everybody was complaining about this, I read one thing where a nurse had to go get like one of the main administrators, like executives at the hospital, and walk him over to Dr. Duncan. He was like, you can't. We can't do brain surgery here. And then finally he was like, fine, I want to do the craniotomy. So he eventually agreed to transfer her out of his care. By the time he decided to do that, she was brain dead.
>> Taylor: Oh, my God.
>> Farz: Yeah, it took way too long. Eventually just brain dead. So he moved on to Mary Eford, where he operated it again on the wrong part of her spine. Which means he accomplished nothing other than ripping out healthy tissue and Leaving all the bad stuff that he was supposed to heal still there. He also placed surgical hardware into muscle instead of bone. So he was screwing in surgical screws into muscle, which can.
>> Taylor: Obviously not supposed to do that.
>> Farz: You're not supposed to do that.
>> Taylor: Tried to hang something up and I didn't hit a stud and I made a hole in the wall. It's like the exact same thing.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Have you ever seen that? Have you ever seen the 10, like the state movie with. With Ken Marino? It's like stupid. It's so. It could not be more stupid. So it's like about like the ten Commandments and like there's like a bunch of vignettes about it and like, they're very dumb. But the one, there's one where Camerino is a surgeon and then he's like, he's like, oh, I left. I left scissors in your wife's stomach as, as a goof. And then the husband is like, you goofed. And he goes, no, no, no, I did it as a goof. While the wife is like crying because she has scissors in her stomach. It's so stupid. But like whenever we mess up, I'm like, oh, no, I did it as a goof.
>> Farz: It was. I was trying to be funny. This was deliberately me trying to be funny.
>> Taylor: Exactly. No, you don't get it.
>> Farz: In the end, in Mary E's case, she was paralyzed and basically just suffered from continuous non stop pain, which she described as 10 plus on a scale of 1 to 10, which I can't even imagine. No, after this, his privileges were pulled from that hospital because they can do that fast. It's not like a staff employee. And they started trying to get salvage surgeries done for especially Mary Erd in this case. They went to a guy, this highly, highly trained guy named Robert Henderson, who ended up doing this surgery. Apparently once he saw the X rays of what he had done to Mary Efford, he immediately knew this was like a legal case. And so when he went for that surgery, he actually recorded the whole thing because he was like, instead of just talking through this, I'm going to record everything so anybody who looks this later can see it. Apparently from what I could understand, Dr. Henderson was like a super chill guy who minded his own business. Like, he wasn't like a. He wasn't a crazy person who's like screaming at people all the time. But when he saw what was going on with Mary either. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Like this, this has to stop. Like, this is really, really, really dangerous. And really, really bad. He decided to investigate Dr. Duntsch himself. He ended up reaching out to the University of Tennessee, and he was like, this guy's not a doctor, right? Like, there's no way a doctor did this. So, like, he. His credentials were fake, right? No, no, he's a doctor. He's been here. And so that's where he started going thinking to himself, like, no competent surgeon would do this.
Dr. Duntsch received privileges at Southampton Community Hospital after botched surgery
They're saying that he's competent, which means he must be crazy. There's no other option.
>> Taylor: Well, if you need surgery, you should go to that guy.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah. He's actually. I think he's still active in Dallas.
>> Taylor: Yeah, I mean, get. Get on his list just in case
>> Farz: there's another guy we're. We're going to talk about too, here. Dr. Henderson was kind of trying to piece all this together for himself. He was reaching out to medical professionals in the DFW area, trying to figure out who knows this guy. Why is he naming his patients? Like, what's going on? Basically, in the meantime, and having had his medical center privileges revoked, Dr. Duntsch receives privileges at apparently the shittiest hospital in Dallas, a place called Southampton Community Hospital. Southampton. So one thing I noticed was that when I listened to that one episode of Wondery, they interviewed the woman who was scheduled to have surgery at Southampton, and her husband show up and like, what is this? Like, this looks like, like a third world situation. Like, there's no chance of doing spinal surgery in this place. It's in a place of Dallas called Oak Cliff, which, like, when we're kids, you were told to never go there. Like, it's not like a pristine place, basically.
>> Taylor: God.
>> Farz: At Southampton Hospital, he was doing a cervical fusion on a guy named Jeff Glidewell when he mistook his neck muscle for a tumor and severed his spinal cord or his vocal cord. Sorry, not his spinal cord. His vocal cord. Still bad. Still bad. He also severed an artery and tried to address the bleeding by shoving surgical sponges into his throat, which he would then leave there after stitching him up as a goof.
>> Taylor: You get it? That was perfect use of as a goof. And what that is like. I mean, like, if you work at a restaurant and you leave a sponge somewhere, you're gonna be in trouble.
>> Farz: So it's funny you say that, because the next thing I wrote here was, he didn't do this alone. There's other people in the operating room, and they're all right. This is one thing that I paid attention to on. The one thing was like, look, as A nurse. Like, if a doctor tells. If a doctor's, like, just, like, hacking away at someone, you're like, well, he's a doctor. Like, he knows what he's doing. Right? Like, it's just the deference that's given, which is not great. We shouldn't do that. Ultimately, this guy Jeff ended up getting sepsis from blood infection caused by the blood sponge that was still in his body after he sewed them back up.
>> Taylor: Yeah, gross. You can't leave. You shouldn't live. I mean, obviously. I mean, that's like, not. I didn't go to medical school, but I know. You shouldn't leave f****** towels in your body when you close yourself up.
>> Farz: I don't think you need to go to medical school for that. You're credible enough to. To state that on your own. Thank you. It was after this surgery that a former colleague of Dr. Duncis would come back in the picture. During Dr. Duncan's time at Baylor Plano, there was a vascular surgeon there named Randall Kirby who was one of the people who observed his operating procedure and was like, this guy's wildly incapable of performing surgery on people. It was Dr. Kirby who would be called in to try and save Jeff Glidewell. He described what he saw when he opened him up as the work of a, quote, crazed maniac. He also said that it almost looked like Dunch was trying to decapitate him from the inside.
>> Taylor: I don't even have words for that, but that sounds like. That doesn't even make sense, and it's disgusting, and I hate it.
>> Farz: Yeah. It was after this that Dr. Kirby reported Dr. Duntsch to the state medical board and joins forces with Dr. Henderson. Typically, trying to get a medical license revoked is a very long process. Like, it's a civil. It's a civil rights matter. Like, you can't just go out and say, we're going to revoke your license. It's a very protracted thing. But both these doctors agreed that this guy was, like, a very present and ongoing danger to the population. The medical board mostly disagreed about this because they were like, it's not possible for a trained surgeon to be as incompetent as how these guys are describing him. They relied on the expert opinion of a very, very seasoned neurosurgeon called Martin Laser, who independently reviewed the medical records of Dungeon's patients and was like, this is the worst case of incompetence we've ever seen.
>> Taylor: Okay, good. I'm glad that he didn't review it.
>> Farz: I'm like, meh, yeah, His. His. His report results in the immediate suspension of his medical license. And from there, he went into basically a downward spiral. He ended up filing for bankruptcy. He was arresting for a dui.
>> Taylor: Who was his friend?
>> Farz: Jerry was his. Jerry Summers was his friend. And that was the one that he turned into a quadriplegic.
>> Taylor: Jesus.
>> Farz: Yeah. Yeah. And he also claimed that him and Dunch were doing cocaine the night before surgery, but then he later retracted that and just said he was angry about how the surgery went.
>> Taylor: So, I mean, I believe both those.
>> Farz: Both those things, but this guy's life was like a train wreck anyways. Like, I. I think I. I don't think I mentioned this before, but, like, when he was in residency, it was known that he was, like, into doing drugs and going to strip clubs. He actually married a stripper. Like, he was. He was just on, like, a weird. He was on a path, let's put it that way.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: And then when he.
Dr. List: This is unprecedented because nobody's done a case like this before
What ended up getting initially arrested was he was literally just shoplifting. Like, he was in so much debt because he couldn't work. And he got arrested for shoplifting in Dallas. He was apparently crazed and was, like, had to be submitted to some psychiatric ward or something because he was just having a total meltdown. What? Several of his patients from Medical center, the ones he wrecked over there, they filed lawsuits against Baylor Plano because they were saying if you had done the right thing and fired him, then he would have been on the registry and nobody else would have hired him and this wouldn't have happened to us. And so they made an argument around that. It's really interesting, Greg Abbott, the current governor of Texas, makes a surprise appearance in this because apparently during this time, he was the state prosecutor who was trying to get this dismissed or thrown out or something. Like, he was. He was getting involved in trying to support the hospital system versus the patients,
>> Taylor: which literally, of course, he was.
>> Farz: Is on Brand. Was going to say it was on
>> Taylor: Brand for him, you know.
>> Farz: Yeah. Meanwhile, Dr. Kirby and Henderson, they were going to the state attorney, and they were thinking, like, look, we got his license revoked in Texas, but he could go somewhere else. He go get a medical license in Hawaii. He could go to another country, get a medical license. Like, if you look at his credentials, like, this guy's crazy, credentialed and qualified. Right. And so what they were trying to do was go to the state and say he needs to be in jail so that he can't do this to anybody else. Like, that's. It's not that we. He's we need to be saved from him as a public.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: This was really so originally. Again, this is unprecedented because nobody's done a case like this before. And the state attorneys apparently did not want to do this case a. Because it's unprecedented. But what they said was this never happens. Like, you never have like a bunch of other highly credentialed neurosurgeons showing up at your door saying, please, for the love of God, take this guy off the streets because he's just dangerous to the general public. And the vigorousness with which Kirby and Henderson pursued this is what resulted in the state getting involved in this.
>> Taylor: God, good for them.
>> Farz: And he. Yeah. He was ultimately arrested on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon being the scalpel. The goal was. Yeah, I mean, literally, it was a scalpel.
>> Taylor: That's so scary.
>> Farz: Yeah. And yeah, the goal was to get him a long enough jail sentence so that under any circumstance, if he comes out of jail, he will never be able to. To operate on anyone again. Like I said at the start, he was convicted and sentenced to a life sentence with a minimum of 30 years being served, meaning that the earliest he could ever get released is about 74 years old. So that's what he's doing. I was going to circle back to one topic later around the credentialing system. So apparently there is a log that you can use a national registry for logging residency hours in operations that you perform. Apparently that's kind of the standard protocol is you do that, but senior staff can override that by just rubber stamping. It's like, we think he's good enough. We're not going to go through and show all the paperwork. I'm not going to show how the math is done. I'm just telling you I saw it done and I think it's good enough. That's what happened here. Because they were like, look, the guy's mostly doing research anyways. Who cares? He's not going to operate on anyone under any circumstance. So.
>> Taylor: Right. And he does then.
>> Farz: He does. And yeah, my last point around that is like this blind deference to like, credential is like the stupidest thing we do as a society. It's like that does not tell you anything for the most part about someone.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: And especially when it comes to things like your doctors and your healthcare and stuff like. Like don't just see a name and a title and blindly trust them. Follow that. Especially when it has to do with your brain and your spine.
>> Taylor: Yeah. Like in the end of the. Because I Listened to the whole Dr. Death show and, like, the question that was like, the why and how? Like, you know, this is a person who, like, I think. I mean, I listened to it a long time ago, but I feel like we're trying to remember. The answer that they had was like, not really. Not even really an answer, but it was like, this person believes he's a spinal surgeon and there's nothing you can do about it. You know, like, he just, like. But he believes it. He's totally bought in. He believes he can do it. No one's told him no, so he keeps going. And even though the stuff that he doesn't know is so, like, blindingly obvious, people, like, who are not doctors, he is like, well, I did this all. I did it. I can do this. And, like, just has this, like, idea that he is this person that he isn't. And it doesn't matter because they're letting him do it, which is so insane.
>> Farz: Yeah, the. The Dr. Death podcast. This was season one. Season one was Dr. Dunge. And again, I only listed one episode of it.
>> Taylor: Yeah, that's great.
>> Farz: We're on season five, I think, and that one is widely available, like, so you can listen to all of it. But that was also a spinal surgeon, that was also a spine surgeon who did that. It was. It's man.
>> Taylor: Some of the others, too. There's one, like, a cancer clinic that told people they had cancer when they didn't to get money for the chemo, which is, like, insane. And like, another guy who said he had, like, a. A cure for AIDS and, like, didn't and hurt a lot of people.
When I was in law school, one case involved Medicare fraud
You're like, listen.
>> Farz: Listen to that one, too. When I was in law school, one case that I was a clerk for a judge, and one case that came before us that I had, like, brief her on before they showed up to the. To our chambers, was the guy who was a doctor, and he was getting medical, like, he was getting Medicare and Medicaid dollars for cancer treatments for people. And the way it works was, let's say you get 101. One unit which is like 100 milliliters. And that's supposed to be applied to patient X, Right. For that. But what if you take that, you break it into four pieces, and then you dilute it with, like, nonsense like saline or whatever, and then you inject it across four people. You just made 4x the amount of money because you defraud. Like, that's actually the most typical version of how doctors get in trouble with the law, is they do stuff like that. They do insurance or Medicare, Medicaid fraud. But, like, you're still killing someone. Like, you're supposed to get units of something and you give them 10, 20, the whole thing. Right, Right. Like, it's not that uncommon, and it's really, really s*****, and it's really, really scary. But I did listen to that one, too. The age one was. Was fascinating, too, because that guy was a magician. Guys, sorry, I'm, like, derailing this whole episode. There was literally, like, a Turkish street magician who became worth hundreds of millions of dollars trying to show building this company that could, like, solve AIDS and cancer treatments. And all he was doing was injecting them with, like, different alloy metals that killed them faster. Like, it was unbelievable.
>> Taylor: Unbelievable. And people are desperate and they want to help each other. People too. Especially with, like, HIV and aids. That was such a community. It's such a community disease that you're like, if I could, why, I'm d. But if you could do stuff to me and maybe save someone else. I feel like that happened in one of our other episodes. Maybe it was like, polio or like, one of the vaccine episodes where someone was like, oh, no, it was Henrietta Lacks, where the guy who had, like, taken her cells and done a lot of the stuff when he was dying of cancer, inevitably, he was like, try everything on me. You know, like, everything that we think might work. Like, let's just try it on me right now, you know, just to see. Might as well. But he was. But he was consenting to that, obviously. It was like his idea. It wasn't like.
>> Farz: Right.
>> Taylor: If you're. You want to know if you're going to be, like, a test subject to these things.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Scary.
>> Farz: Yeah. Don't follow blindly. Anyhow, that's my story.
>> Taylor: Anyhow. That's scary. Yeah. Your spine stuff is so scary. If you can't, like, fall sudden, you can't move. Yeah, there's a lot, A lot in there.
>> Farz: That. That one. The one I mentioned, the. The other spine surgeon that I'm listening to. I'm on, like, episode three or four right now of the doctor Death one. This woman was talking about her mom who had this, like, spinal pain. But it was, like, manageable stuff. Right. It' it's like what I have right now where it's like. It's just. It's uncomfortable. If I laid still too long, I'm, like, creaky. And I got to do yoga every now and then to like.
>> Taylor: Yeah, so great.
>> Farz: Exactly. But, like, imagine having that and then you go To a doctor, the way this one was described was, like, her mom, who's, like, the most chipper, happy, sociable person in the world, would, like, tell her about how she was planning on killing herself because I can't see the pain anymore.
>> Taylor: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
>> Farz: It's that bad. So.
>> Taylor: Well, that happens also with Lasix. Like, there's a 1% chance that, like, you feel so bad. Like, I have a friend of a friend, whatever, who had it when she was older and she had to go to, like, a place for a while to, like, get back together, get her brain back together. Because Lasik, if it. If it. There's, like, a chance that it f**** you up so much that you, like, try to end your life, or you, like, for lack of a better term, just, like, go crazy because it's in so much pain. Things are so weird, like, with your eyes, you know, And I'm like, I don't.
>> Farz: Yeah, just don't do it. Just don't do elective stuff. I mean, do elective stuff. As long as it's like. Like, whatever. Like, it's just like, don't. Don't mess with your. The way it's been designed is probably the way you need to keep it. Like, a human's hands are never going to be better than the way it's architected right now.
>> Taylor: I know.
>> Farz: So anyhow.
A new AI system can detect breast cancer years in advance of before
>> Taylor: Anyhow, that's scary. But, yeah, thank you for sharing that. Those stories are a lot. And again, like, they're people that you should trust and you can't all the time, and that sucks.
>> Farz: Don't trust anybody. That's why AI is so great. Because, like, let's trust AI. It would never lead me down the wrong path.
>> Taylor: Well, I feel like the thing. I know you're joking, but I feel like the thing that with AI that I do, like, you know, I'm. I'm 44. I go get a mammogram every year, you know, and there's, like, a new AI thing that you can, like, check a box and they look at your tissues with, like, an extra stuff, and they can detect breast cancer years in advance of before. Like, that's what. That's what I wanted to do. That's amazing. You know, so stuff like that is cool if you could, like, fold that into these things to be like, hey, I can see these things that are going to happen because we have these, like, early indicators. Like, that is super cool.
>> Farz: There was. There was this one. I think it was a daily episode where there's this company that's Trying to take like things that shouldn't give you a ton of insight but that everybody has and try to get AI to give insight from this. So, for example, I think their use case there was can an ekg, can a doctor or AI look at an EKG over time and then determine the potential health outcomes of someone's heart over the next like 10, 20 years? And there's something, I'm misquoting it. But long story short was that. Well, the long story short was like AI, if you were to run, if it was giving the outputs, it was able to predict it with like a 67% accuracy rate. It was like, well, what was it for a cardiologist? Like, it was a coin flip. It was 50, 50 have them guessed right, Half them guess wrong. That says a lot.
>> Taylor: Yeah. And I think. And then like, I mean, like five years ago I worked at a different job, but I was working with the data team and we called it machine learning then. But it's AI and we could predict when someone was going to turn based on the stuff that we knew. So I was like, this is what I know. This is like the actual things that people say and do and blah, blah, blah. And then there like, well, here's the data of who has turned. I put them together. I was exactly right. You know, you could see those things like really, really early. And that was like, you know, business related. But like that's the same thing with health stuff. To be like, oh, you have these symptoms, this and this. Like, I don't know. That's cool. But yeah, I know that's it's, I don't know, scary. But I also wish we all like also in the 10 she watched it tonight. It's so stupid. You're going to be like, what is this? But there's a whole other comedy. Yes, and there's a whole other bit where for some reason there's like two guys who are trying to, like their neighbor is trying to one up each other and it's like, oh, I have a better pool than you. I have a better blah, blah, blah. And they start buying MRI machines and they buy every MRI machine in town and their houses are filled with MRI machines. And then all the children go on a field trip to nuclear power plant. There's a meltdown and the only way to save the children is to get them all MRIs. But there's no MRI machines because these two guys have them in their house. That just reminds me of that.
>> Farz: This looks pretty good.
>> Taylor: Oh my God, Please watch it. Okay, that's it. I'm done. I'm done with. With random stuff.
Morgan suggested that we download skyview satellite guide to see where satellites are
I do have one listener mail.
>> Farz: Yes.
>> Taylor: Morgan suggested that we download skyview satellite guide, which will show us where satellites are, which is an app you can get on your phone. Which seems really fun because we had talked about the cosmonauts and satellites and what's going on up in our orbit. Plus like the Tesla is up there for whatever reason. And I also saw like a headline that was like, you know, there's a Starlink plan to put so many satellites in space it will ruin the night sky forever. Stuff like that. That's hilarious. I don't, I didn't follow up on that because I don't want to, but it'd be, I was thinking when I was watching fireworks other day to be like, you know, it'd be cool to see them from a plane. Right? I once saw fireworks.
>> Farz: So cool.
>> Taylor: I was on a bridge on a bus and there were fireworks next to us and it was awesome in New York City and like everybody on the bus was like, woohoo. It was like a very heartwarming people together moment. But it'd be cool to see it from a plane. But I was watching the sky and I was like, oh, is there a plane? I was like, I don't know, is the satellite. I' I might download that to see where the satellites are because that's kind of fun.
>> Farz: I have used that app before actually. That was really cool.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Well, Morgan, thank you. Thanks for writing in. And again, anybody else who wants to write in, give us your thoughts, your questions, concerns, comments, whatever it is, write to us@duneflpodmail.com or on the socials at Dollpod. Anything else we got, Taylor?
>> Taylor: That's it. We have a bunch of new like likes and stuff on Instagram which is super exciting. So please remember that we have like a super huge archive. This is like 250 something. So we have so many, so many things to go back to and, and look at and they all kind of tie together and it's really fun. So please go and look into our archive. You know, we have a little bit of banter in the beginning that may be topical, but all of it is pretty evergreen. So go back.
>> Farz: Yeah, it's mostly evergreen.
>> Taylor: You learn so much.
>> Farz: Sweet. Thanks Taylor. Anything else?
>> Taylor: Thanks. No, thank you.
>> Farz: Alrighty. Got off there. Thanks,
>> Taylor: Sam.