On being a physician in Maryland

                              On being a physician in Maryland

In 2003 the Maryland Legislature imposed on its physician community a new medical board reminiscent of Soviet style committees replete with the equivalent of commissars. It draconian intent was to capture as many “bad” physicians as possible. The Medical Board’s executive director at the time publicly admitted they wanted to improve their sanction numbers amongst the fifty states. The 2003 decree increased the number of Board members to 21 from 15 with 40% of its composition drawn from outside the profession. These consumer members would have full voting privileges on medical licensing. By diluting the composition of the Board its so-called expertise diminished to a point which called into question whether this is even a specialty board. Maryland Courts, especially in the Appellate division, continually defer to the Medical Board’s expertise on medical decisions. The 2003 changes abolished any semblance of expertise among its membership in favor of this fair and balanced format. Fair to whom? As usual the Maryland Medical Society kept a low profile and did not argue against this new and “improved” political entity. Maryland’s 27,000 physicians moved through their usual daily regimens without blinking. Many are awakening to the fact that their rights as citizens and professionals have been curtailed during their time of quiescence. To accomplish the task of sanctioning more physicians the Board had to derive a scheme that would withstand judicial review. Welcome to standards of care, an unwritten enumeration of medical comparisons which basically states: How would the majority have managed the case? To enforce these unwritten standards on physicians the Board engaged hired guns, paid them well and set them loose on their colleagues. A recent decision by the Court of Special Appeals allows a sole physician, who is not in the medical specialty of the case under review, to be the decisive reason for a medical license revocation. Junk Science can now uncouple a physician from his medical license by the word of a single reviewer contrary to Maryland Law and Mandate. More profoundly, the Maryland Courts especially its Appellate divisions have been in the back pockets of the Maryland “Board” of Physicians for two decades. Physicians must face the obvious fact that Maryland Judges hold an extreme bias against medical doctors and have gone to the extent of suppressing due process rights as a result of this intrinsic prejudice.  Maryland Board of Physicians has a personal hammer at their disposable to carry out these fraudulent raids on physicians careers in the form of the Attorney General’s Office. Lawyers from this Office are exercised in lying to Maryland Judges, circumventing physicians’ due process rights, withholding evidence, refusing to provide evidentiary materials, provide false and inaccurate information to the media and more. As representatives of the Board they will spend as much taxpayer money that is necessary to bring retribution to these evil doctors. Physicians who have been through the sanctioning process have spent upwards of hundreds of thousands to clear their names and retain some semblance of a career not destroyed by the multi-year victimization that the Board inflicts on their chosen targets. Physicians train on the average more than a decade to have the expertise you expect from them. In the inner sanctum of this reconstituted board they can vote your livelihood away in seconds. On being a physician in Maryland only the political elite and denizens of the two Ivory Towers in Baltimore will escape the wrath of an entity that should never have been let loose on the physician populous. Any of the elitists out there who care to debate these issues, please contact me at platomd@gmail.com. Mark Davis MD author of the controversial book Demons of Democracy.