Anatomy of a Tragedy | The Texas Observer:
We now know that the Texas Medical Board was working behind the scenes in summer 2012, trying to find grounds to temporarily suspend Duntsch’s license. The temporary suspension was a power the Legislature gave the board in 2003. For the first time, the board could suspend without a hearing doctors who “constituted a continuing threat to the public welfare,” i.e., cases where the public couldn’t afford to wait for the full board proceedings. For a temporary suspension, the standard is even higher than the board’s other enforcement actions. It isn’t enough to prove that a doctor did something awful. To suspend a license, as one Medical Board staffer explained, there has to be enough evidence to prove a pattern.
And while the Medical Board investigated, the pattern continued. If you were a patient in the Dallas area around this time looking for a spine surgeon, there would have been nothing to suggest that Duntsch was a risky choice. Because investigations are confidential, Duntsch’s public record with the Texas Medical Board remained clean. On the online doctor-rating site Healthgrades.com, he had 4.5 stars out of five. He had a slick marketing team in Best Docs Network, a physician PR company that pumps out infomercials to local TV stations. In one, Duntsch tells the story, over stock footage of an operation, of a taxing back surgery he performed on an older woman. The surgery, he said, beaming into the camera, was a resounding success. “And the only thing she complained about was she couldn’t find what she wanted to watch on TV.”
Meanwhile, he was continuing to get patients, continuing to operate. In December 2012, he performed a cervical fusion at Legacy Surgery Center of Frisco that left his patient with paralyzed vocal cords—an unheard-of complication. In January, one of his patients at University General Hospital Dallas woke up paralyzed from the waist down, according to the patient’s lawyer.