Something You Need To Know About The Top Secret NC Medical Board
They don't like scrutiny. Especially if there's a possibility it could be found they're not in compliance with federal or state law.
Dear CPR Fans:
You’re liable to need CPR following this: (yes, double entendre intended.)
The remarkable NC Medical Board that failed to oversee the due process-bereft NCPHP, its exclusively contracted and salary-dependent fitness-for-duty operation, and was called out for it in 2014 by the NC Auditor, was itself just subject to a Performance Audit by the same state auditor, Beth Wood. You know how NCMB handled it? They refused to cooperate.
State auditor. State agency (purportedly).
Told her to go to hell. Well, actually told her to go to the General Assembly, which is close.
Specifically, she was investigating their Stasi investigations unit, a boiler room operation that strives to build a case file on every physician in NC; collects as much dirt as they can, no matter how minuscule; and then adds their own mud when convenient to brew a toxic stew. She wanted to know what’s going on there? Really legit? Abiding by law? Treating docs fairly? Do you guys have any oversight? (Answer to the last is a clear ‘no.’)
They told her they wouldn’t let her examine their investigations dept’s database, case records, or even its investigations protocol, saying (re protocol) ‘we don’t even have one, lady.’ They added, as if both to normalize this and relieve the auditor of worry ‘None of the medical boards do.’
Well, I sure feel reassured, don’t you? NCMB and all medical boards in the country are winging it when it comes to handling their investigations and issuing charges. Doing it capriciously and opaquely. No criteria needed to open an investigation and descend on the doc’s practice. Just hunch, sniffin’ things out, got an inside scoop. The decision to conduct one may not even involve approval by a board member, though explicitly required by law. ‘We don’t need one’ as I was straightforwardly informed by a former NCMB chief of investigations – they can open any investigation on a whim. And apparently run the sham investigation any way they want, the same way they seek experts’ opinions – selecting out only those who agree with them on whatever matter’s at hand. Doesn’t take much to slant an investigation that way, does it? Interview and quote liberally from the accusers; ignore any testimony and evidence to the contrary. Then assert the investigation’s file is privileged.
I initially planned just one podcast on the audit and was going to post the accompanying essay, but, lordy, the thing got out of hand. The more I wrote, the more I reflected; the more I reflected, the more I wrote. So I had to break it up into a series of podcasts and articles. It’s amazing how much this non-audit audit report revealed.
So that you don’t get confused: the initial podcast I did on it last week, I relabeled as “Overview.” NC Medical Board Thwarts State Audit - Overview
Moving forward, the series will be identified by labeling Part 1, 2 etc.
Here’s that PODCAST Part 1 NCMB Audit - Part 1 - NC Medical Board Completely Thwarted Authorized State Performance Audit
And here’s that ARTICLE Part 1 NCMB Audit - Part 1 - NC Medical Board Completely Thwarted Authorized State Performance Audit
(Yes, same title for article and podcast; you can tell by the earphones icon when you visit Substack, or when the audio player appears.)
And if you haven’t yet added Physician Interrupted to your followed newsletters, suggest you do so - that way you get notified, comes to your email, sits in your selected newsletter library on the app, and makes it all around easier, and that way you won’t miss anything.
Now, an update since even that was posted.
When I first saw the audit report and the auditor’s crisp observations about NCMB’s evasive responses, I commented to colleagues “she’s pretty daring … wonder if she knows they don’t want her diggin’ for bones in their backyard, and they don’t like her not pickin’ up the terse “back off, lady” messaging that NCMB’s Henderson sent in response. I mean, if you’re running an operation that drums up cases, collaborates with an unlicensed psychiatric outfit to conduct sham evaluations under a false identity, and then feeds those licensees to the extraordinarily profitable inside-referral PHP Physician Impairment Treatment network with no chance of contest, and you have no state oversight, you could get a bit reactive and want to make sure she gets the message.
A few days later, the story comes out of Raleigh from one of their propaganda rags that “NC Auditor Involved in Hit and Run.” At first, I feared SHE was side-swiped. But no, it’s more curious.
Allegedly, she was involved in an accident immediately upon leaving her office, hitting a parked car. She was reported to have returned to the building. It was reported as leaving the scene of an accident. Quite a dramatic story. And there’s a lot of hooplas seemingly aimed toward discrediting her and portraying her as … you guessed it “impaired.” (Might she have been? Quite unlikely, but I guess anything’s possible. So is sabotage. I’m no stranger to the severe retaliation playbook.)
What’s really curious is that this accident apparently happened about 3 weeks prior to her publishing her NCMB report. And apparently, it was already being investigated by Raleigh police.
So, why’s it come out now? And so dramatically as a front page headline story (and it would seem erroneously, as it apparently doesn’t meet the criteria for “hit and run”).
One does get the sense that there’s an agenda here.
(BTW, this was the same paper that refused to do any story on the NC Auditor’s 2014 NCPHP findings that 1,140 physicians’ due process was likely violated, NCMB failed to oversee them, and they thus may have been disciplined wrongly by NCMB, even to the point of license suspension, say, for not agreeing with NCPHP’s infallible diagnostic assessment and order to submit to interrogation at one NCMB’s “preferred” programs in Kansas featuring a polygraph examiner. That’s a lot of due process violations. Admittedly, I’m no lawyer, but what I’ve seen is that, unlike NCMB’s administrative kangaroo court, the civil courts don’t look favorably on that and can dismiss a case in its entirely simply on that basis. I still can’t figure out why a paper wouldn’t find that storyworthy. Just as I can’t figure out why NC’s “professional license defense counsel,” an invented specialty, didn’t jump on that report to demand that NCMB reverse judgment on their clients’ due process-deprived cases. )
I guess we’ll learn more eventually. But when dealing with enterprises that might be called out for violating the law and might have something to hide, discrediting and well-timed career derailment are tactics straight from the retaliation and intimidation playbook. And if - admittedly if - these occurrences were linked, it wouldn’t surprise me if that dramatic character disparagement served to adversely influence the legislature’s endorsement of her right to audit NCMB. Nor would it surprise me if she chose to back away from the audit altogether. Intimidation sorta has that effect.
Independent of whatever we learn about her accident (I suspect anybody who gets ensnared in the NCMB NCPHP nexus is at risk for being driven to drink or drug, just to forget the encounter), her documentation of NCMB’s defiant lockout remains. And if what ensues is her backing away from that audit, it seems that would speak for itself.