Doomed to Fail - Ep 253: Don't trust anyone - Dr. Christopher Duntsch

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

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. Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In the matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortenthall James Simpson, case number B.A. 019. And so, my fellow Americans. And what your country can do for you. Taylor, we are here and we are live in the flesh. That's a weird way to say it. How you doing? 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 going to have an awesome time. And I'm here by myself for many. many days. I'm taking vacation just to clean my house and paint and do things. And I'm very excited. I'm going to paint like a hallway, a dark green. I'm going to do a bunch of touchups. I'm just going to 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. Knowing how productive you are, Taylor, when you have children,

a husband, a career to juggle, I can't even imagine. You are probably going to just like build a house or so. I have no idea. I mean, 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 it one more thing, but I've made you some really fun stuff and you're going to be like, oh my God, I love that stuff that you made me. I told Juan, I wish that everyone had two birthdays because that's how much I love 3D printing 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. Please, please. I'm going to throw in some stuff for her as well in your

birthday present and 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, I'm like, 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 over night and all that stuff so anyway lots to come in my three-debrating adventures you're the most productive person I think I know um well sweet you want to go ahead and introduce us uh yeah hello everyone welcome to doomed to fail we bring you historical disasters and failures and today we're going to hear

from farce i'm taylor and i'm going to hear a story bars is going to tell to me yes i'm going to tell a story i learned in the process of researching my topic that apparently there was a was like a peacock show about this topic that Alex Waldwood 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. Then when you find a topic and you're like, I can't speak it to get to the bottom of this. Like, what have we done? What is going on? Yeah, what hell have we wrought on ourselves? So that's the flavor of this topic. I can't think of what it would be.

I feel like I don't, I don't know. I definitely didn't watch that show because it doesn't come, doesn't sound familiar. So tell me more. Yeah. So I'm going to be covering a doctor who, and a surgeon, he's a, whatever, he has a unique distinction of being the first physician in the U.S. history to be convicted of aggravated assault for actions he took while performing.

performing surgery on somebody. Who is it the spinal surgeon guy? You do know it. I do. I listen to the doctor of death about him, but tell me more because it's so good and so crazy. 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 doctor death one, and you got to pay to get access 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 going to cover soup to nuts. I can't wait to talk about it because it's wild. Yeah, it's incredible. I reread through everything here multiple times. And also it's really fun because you're like, how? How did this? How is this possible?

Like all that stuff. So it's a lot to get into. It's also like 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. 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 a 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 what he actually did because you'll it almost sounds like I'm making stuff up but I'm not like it's crazy what he gets people 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 yes yes to whatever that guy decides to do you know yeah so it is it is obviously very very scary yeah

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 U.S. medical system in general, namely the deference that we give doctors and kind of like the status that they hold in our society. And also from a slight rant perspective, I look this up. Do you know that each neurosurgeon in a hospital is generally expected to generate around $3.4 million in revenue for that hospital?

Ew. Right. That, like, should be part of their metric. 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 this thing or not. That's not the right person for that job. Ew. 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 the town hand surgeon on call on Fourth of July, just being like, oh, like he's going to have a very busy night on the Fourth of July trying to reattach fingers of idiots. 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 when 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.

He was a dual-track kind of medical degree, PhD. thing going on to the University of Tennessee's Health Science Center. He also had a doctorate and microbiology from St. Jude, which he claimed to have graduated Magnificumade from, which he didn't because the school didn't have microbiology

program when he was there. So it's at least check your facts if you're lying. I don't know, but I guess no one cares. 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. not. Like, why make it up? Like, who cares? Just move on with your life, right? Right. Like, why add that, that lie for a reason? You're right. He completed a five-year neurosurgery residency, a minimally invasive spinal surgery fellowship as well. And 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, and, and, you know, 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 was going 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 a minimum of 1,000 operations during that training. Dr. Dunch performed less than 100. We don't know exactly how many, but less than 100. I think it's interesting, and I'm going to be very chatty, probably. But I think it's 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, 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 it how long is my flight? Six hours are the most? Like, that ends up, that feels like a lot. So I feel like I don't really know what that means. I think it's mostly just the idea.

I mean, I was literally just watching the pit earlier today. 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 when they're so when it's down. 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.

So I mentioned that there are 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. 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 France. So again, he was a profit center for this part of the university. And he made the university

looked really good from like a public institution perspective. 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 fly. This 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's bringing in a ton of cash from his rancid fellowship stuff.

He's mostly spending his time in a lap 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 reputationalally. Like, we would be taking kind of like a end-stage neurosurgeon ready to go out 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. 1,000%. And that's what they do to priests. Right. Yes, exactly. It's exact same concept. Call the police.

I don't know. I don't know. So the administration knew that he lacked the required of 1,000 operations to complete his residency, but they rubber stamped his credentials anyways. I'm going to talk by that later on because things aren't that much different today than they were back then. I'll explain why that is. 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. It's true. Can I see your transcript? Like, I don't know. I want to know more about what you got in surgery class. The key thing about that is that in medical school, the ones who did poorly or the ones who do not get accepted into high profile residences like cardiac, vascular or neurosurgery. That makes me feel a bit better.

So like maybe they're like a, they're going to operate. at my elbow, but not my, like, her heart. No, most, the Cs are mostly going to become family physicians, right? Like, that's, they'll tell you to drink Gatorade and to rest. Like, that's their job. If you get C's in medical school. I'm laughing, like, I'm qualified at all to be even a D-level doctor. But, like, yes, like what you're saying.

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 and Playa. 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. ended up waking up with paralyzed legs. You have Lee Passmore, who had surgical hardware installed the wrong part of the spine. And then later on, as Dr. Dunch 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 death in the operation. There was a vascular surgeon in there with him, this guy named Mark Loyal, who physically removed.

Dr. Dunch from hacking his way through this guy who's bleeding to death. So that's bad flavor. It feels very like bare minimum to be in the right spot. You would think so. So there's going to be several things that keep coming over and over again. One is that he keeps cutting major blood or arteries. And the others, he keeps operating in the wrong part. Part of he wonders if he just is like reading the x-rays.

backwards, you know? I just, 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's I'm going to write on the 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. Wasn't our guy one time who I had to have like a leg amputated?

because of diabetes or something and they cut off the wrong leg. I think so. I feel like yes. Yeah, exactly. Rounding out this list from Baylor Plano, you have Jerry Summers who needed to have two of his neck vertebrae fused. Dr. Dunch accidentally sliced through 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. Oh, my God. So in the process of trying to stop the bleeding, Dr. Dunch pack the area with a ton of clotting agent called gel foam, 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 quadruplegia.

So there you go. Who is that good news for her? I don't know. I'm just trying to make a bite. Then you have a woman named Kelly Martin during her decompression operating. which is described as literally the simplest type of spinal surgery you can do, which none of it sounds that simple, but still. Yeah. Dr. Dudge, again, separate an artery.

And he apparently kept going even as a trauma surgeon and the anesthesiologist, anesthesiologist, whatever, you know what I'm saying. Anesthesiologist. Great job. Make so much money. They were pointing out that she was losing way too much blood. But apparently, when she woke her from surgery, she just started screaming and clawing at her legs until they had to put her down again. and then she would later on that night, bleak death.

Well, that's one of the worst ways to go. Pretty bad, yeah. 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. It's just... If you fuck it up, like, like right now I'm wearing an arm, brace, but our heart's... so bad. Like I think I pulled a muscle or nerve or something or whatever, but like, yeah,

I know. The thought of having to like have surgery, recover from it and the chances of it being fucked up and like all the things, like, you would never be the same. 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 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, you're the staff surgeon, is kind of a big deal and you can't just do it. Well, again, it's all kind of tied to reputation.

Like, well, this guy's a big show. That's what all this has to do with. It's like so many of those things were like, I'm so sorry to, like, I don't get it up. Like in like businesses where they were like, well, if we if we punish our sexual predators, then like people know we have 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 out. And you're like, that's what you're supposed to do.

You know? Like, I feel like you're. 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. Yeah, you can't disentangle the growing sentiment in the U.S. around, like, against institutions with like stuff like this, right? Like, there's a reason why we feel the way we feel. Yeah. 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 subscribed 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 with Dr. Dunch. Like he didn't have a good enough reputation. And so it was one. It was one. widely believe the peer review would come bad. They'd have to fire him anyways. So in exchange for not having to fire him, they allowed Dr. Dunch 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 of lawsuits for the people that he hacked to death, essentially. Jesus Christ. 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. Which seems like good. They should have done. It's what they should have done. Why? How many why do that? Yeah, they let him just like resign and walk away.

So this is the part where I circle back on the staff surgeon versus having privileges at a hospital because the incentives are very different between the two. In this case, the staff surgeon, a hospital has to care about kind of the optics of all the things that this rental 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. Dunch's second act only lasted a week because they didn't have to go through

all this crap that Baylor had to go through. After he left Baylor Plano, he ends up with surgical privileges to Dallas Medical Center. And he'll like, 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 fluella round he yet again severed for vertebral artery wow that's a tough word vertebral artery this is the same thing you've 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 Eifford. Apparently, the hospital kept trying to get him to focus on Brown, or at the very least transfer her out of his care, instead of worrying about Mary's surgery at that time. But Mary's surgery was going to be left if she could do it then or she could do it later. This woman 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 craniotomy on fluella 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 hostile 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. Dunch and 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 brain autonomy. So he eventually agreed to transfer her out of his care. But the time he decided to do that, she was brain dead. Oh my God. Yeah, it took way too long. He eventually just brain dead. So he moved on to Mary Eifford, 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 never work. I've been not supposed to do that. I really had to hang something up but I didn't hit a stud and I it had a hole in the wall. It's like the exact same thing. Yeah.

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 it's like a bunch of vignettes about it and like they're very dumb. But there's one, there's one where Ken Marino is a surgeon.

And then he's like, oh, I left a, I left scissors in your wife's stomach. as a goof. And then the husband is like, you goofed? And he goes, no, 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. It was, I was trying to be funny. This was deliberately me trying to be funny. Exactly. No, you don't get it. In the end, in Mary Eifford's case, she was paralyzed and basically just suffered from continuous nonstop pain, which she described as, 10 plus on a scale of 1 to 10, which I can't even imagine.

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 Eifford 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 Eifford, 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 and I record everything so anybody

who looks at this later can see it, apparently from what I could understand, Dr. Henderson was like a super chill guy who minded his own business. And 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 Eford, you were like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Like this, this has to stop. Like this is really, really, really, really dangerous and really, really bad. had, he decided to investigate Dr. Dunst himself. He ended up reaching out to the University of Tennessee.

And he was like, this guy is not a doctor, right? Like, there's no way a doctor did this. So, like, his credentials were fake, right? No, no, no, he's a doctor. He's been here. And so that's where he started going, thinking of himself, like, no competent surgeon would do this. They're saying the only telling me that he's competent,

which means he must be crazy. There's no. other option. Well, if you need surgery, you should go to that guy. Yeah. Yeah, actually, I think he's still active in Dallas. Yeah, I mean, get on his list just in case. There's another guy 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 like, who knows this guy? Why is he maybe his patients? Like, what's going on, basically? In the meantime, and having had his medical center provoked, Dr. Dunch,

receives privileges at apparently the shittiest hospital in Dallas, a place called South Hampton 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 showed up in like, what is this? Like this looks like a third world situation. Like there's no chance to do in spinal surgery in this place. It's in a place of Dallas called Oak Cliff,

which when we're kids, you were told to never go there. Like, it's not, like, a pristine place, basically. At Southampton Hospital, he was doing a cervical fusion on a guy named Jeff Riedwell 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 sponge into his throat, which you would then leave there after stitching him up as a goof.

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 going to be in trouble. So it's funny you said 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, this is the one thing that I paid attention to on the wondering 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. Yeah, gross. You can't leave. You shouldn't leave. I mean, obviously.

I mean, that's like non. I didn't go to medical school, but I know you shouldn't leave. towels in your body when you close yourself up. I don't think you need to go to medical school for that. You're credible enough to state that on your own. Thank you. It was after this surgery that a former colleague of Dr. Dunches would come back in the picture. During Dr. Dunch'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 Clydewell. 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. I don't even have words for what that sounds like that. Does it make sense and it's disgusting and I hate it? Yeah.

It was after this that Dr. Kirby reported Dr. Dunch to 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 rights matter. Like, you can't just say, we're going to revoke your license. It's a very protractive 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 neuroscient. surgeon 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. Okay, good. I'm glad that he didn't review it. I'm like, meh. Yeah. 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 DUI. His wife and kids all left him.

Who was his friend? Jerry was his, Jerry Summers was his friend and that was the one that he turned into a quadriplegic. Jesus. 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. I mean,

I believe both those things. But this guy's life was like a train wreck anyways. Like 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 yeah um and then when he what ended up getting him initially arrested was he was literally just shoplifting like he was in so much dead because he couldn't work and he got

arrested for shoplifting in Dallas he was apparently crazy and was like had to be some psychiatric ward or something because he was just having a total meltdown 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 to 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 getting involved in trying to like support the hospital system versus the patients,

which she kind of, of course, he was. He was going to say it was on brand for him. Ew. Ew. 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'd go get a medical license in Hawaii. You'd go to another country and get a medical license. Like, if you look at his question, 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, like, he needs to be, we need to be saved from him as a public. Yeah. 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 a 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. God, good for them. 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 that's so scary yeah and yeah the goal was to get him a long enough jail sentence 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 sent us 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 as 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. it's good enough. That's what I haven't 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 let me go. Right. And he does. Then 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 to the most part about someone. Right. And especially when it comes to things like your doctors and your health care and stuff like like like don't just see a name and a title and blindly trust and follow that especially when it has to do with your brain and your spine yeah like in the end of the because I listened to the whole doctor death show and like the question that was like the why and how like you know and this is a person

who like I think I mean I listened to it a long time ago but I feel like I remember they the 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. Yeah. 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 blightingly obvious to people who are not doctors, he is like, well, I did this all. I did it. I can do this. and just has this 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.

Yeah. The Dr. Death podcast, this was season one. Season one was Dr. Dunch, and again, I only listened on one episode of it. Yeah, it's great. We're on season five, I think, and that one is widely available. 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. I listen to 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 um and like another guy who said he had like a cure for AIDS and like didn't and hurt a lot of people you're like listen to 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 had like brief her on before they showed up to the to her 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 see, get 100, one unit, which is like 100 milliliters, and that's supposed to be applied to patient X, right? And you get paid 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 have made four X amount of money because you defrauded. 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 if you're supposed to get up to units of something and you give them 10, 20 of it.

They need the whole thing. Right. Right. Like it's not that uncommon and it's really, really shitty and it's really, really scary. But I did listen to that one too. The AIDS one that was fascinating too. Because that guy was a magician. Guys, sorry, I'm like, be railing this whole episode. There was literally like a Turkish street magician who became worth hundreds of millions of trying to go 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. Unbelievable. And people are desperate. And they want to help other people too, like especially with like HIV and AIDS. That was such a community, it's such a community disease that you're like, if I could, well, I'm dying. But if you could do stuff to me and maybe save someone else, I feel that happened in one of our other episodes. Maybe it was like polio. or like one of the vaccine episodes

or someone was like, oh no, it was Henry Rada lax, 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, if you're, you want to know if you're going to be

like a test subject to these things. Yeah. It's scary. Yeah. Yeah. Don't follow shit blindly. Anyhow, that's my story. Anyhow, that's scary.

Yeah, your spine stuff is so scary if you can't, like, fall in a sudden, you can't move. Yeah. There's a lot, a lot in there. That one, the one I mentioned, the other spine surgeon that I'm listening to on, like, episode of three or four right now of the Dr. Death one, this woman was talking about her mom who had this, like, spinal pain, but it was, like, manageable stuff, right? It's like, it's like what I have right now where it's like, it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable if I laid still too long.

I'm like clique-y and I got to do yoga every down then to like... Yeah, yeah. We're in our 40s. You don't feel great. Exactly. But like imagine having that and then you go to a doctor. The way this one was a striving was like her mom who was like the most chipper, happy, sociable person in the world would like tell her about how she was planning on killing herself.

Because she could I can't take the pain anymore. Yeah. No, yeah. Like it's that bad. So. Well, that happens also with LASX. Like was a 1% chance that like, you feel so bad.

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 LASIC, if it, if it, there's like a chance that it fucks you up so much that you like try to end your life.

Or you like, for lack of the better term, just like go crazy because it's in so much pain and things are so weird, like with your eyes. You know, and I'm like, I don't know. Yeah, just don't do it. Just don't do a life. 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. I know. So, anyhow. Anywho, that's scary. But yeah, thank you for sharing that those stories are a lot. And again, like, there are people that you should trust and you can't all the time.

And that sucks. Don't trust anybody. That's why AI is so very. Because like let's trust AI. It would never lead me down the wrong path. 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 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 before.

Like, that's what I wanted to do. That's amazing, you know? Stuff like that is cool. If you could, like, fold that into these things to be like, hey, you can see these things that are going to happen because they have these, like, early indicators. Like, that is super cool. 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 tried to get AI to give insight for this. So, for example, I think their use case there was, can an EFECD, KG can a doctor or AI look at an EKG over time and then determine the potential health outcomes of someone's part over the next 10, 20 years. And there's something. I'm miss blowing it. The long story was that was that was, well, the long story of year was that 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? It was a coin flip. It was 50-50. Half of him guess right. Half of him guess wrong. That says a lot. Yeah.

And I think, and then like, I mean, like five years ago, I worked in 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 they were like, well, here's the data of who has churned. 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, you should watch it tonight. It's so stupid. You're going to be like, what is this? But there's a whole other. Yes. And there's a whole other bit where, for some reason, there's, like, two guys who are trying to, like, their neighbors, trying to want 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 a nuclear power plant and there's a meltdown and the only way to save the children is they get them all MRIs

but there's no MRI machines because these two guys have them in their house. It just reminds me of that. That's pretty good. Oh my God, we watch it. Okay, that's it. I'm done. I'm done with random stuff. I do have one listener mail. Yes. Morgan suggested that we download Skyview satellite guide which will show us where satellites are,

as an app you can get on your phone, which seems really fun because we talked about the cosmonauts and satellites and what's going on up in our orbit. Plus like the Tesla that's up there for whatever reason. I also saw like a headline that was like, you know, there's a startling plan to put so many satellites in space that will ruin the night sky forever. Stuff like that. That's hilarious. 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 the other day to be like, you know, it'd be cool to see them from a plane, right? I won't saw fireworks. Oh, that was so cool.

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 would be cool to see it from a plane. But I was watching the sky, and I was like, oh, there are a plane. I was like, I don't know, it was a satellite. I'm not sure. But I might download that to see where the satellites are because that's kind of fun.

I had to use that app before, actually. That's really cool. Yeah. Well, Morgan, thank you 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 at DoomfellPod at gmail.com or on the socials at Doomefelpod. Anything else we got, Taylor? That's it. We have a bunch of new 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 you 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. Yeah, it's mostly evergreen. You learn so much. Sweet. Thanks, Taylor. Anything else? Thanks. No, thank you. All right. We've got it off there. Thanks all.