What in heaven's name could I say more about any of the following. I think your experience speaks for itself.

Hi Bob,

Malia and I [Shawn Kirby, Malia Kirby, practitioners on staff here at Blue Poppy] had a discussion recently and thought we would drop you a line. We both feel that there seems to be an alarming trend emerging in our field. To all appearances, there seems to be a complete and utter lack of basic medical ethics or a working understanding of transference and appropriate patient boundaries.

...

To date, in our short careers, we have encountered or dealt with:

Practitioners treating immediate family members for serious and even morbid diseases like cancer, renal failure and even end-stage AIDS

Countless parents who call asking questions about how to treat their children (Your excellent blog stopped a lot of these calls however)

Practitioners treating while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. This is openly admitted, and many state that being high on marijuana enhances their “ability to feel qi”

Instructors sleeping with students

A number of students who asked out or propositioned multiple clinic patients

I forget if it was you or Honora (or both of you) who told me, but Marilyn Allen says her biggest malpractice payout is for practitioners sleeping with their patients

Insurance Fraud -

Principles/owners in a practice hiring assistants and then using the assistant’s EIN number after the assistant has moved on and left the practice

Principles/owners who offer to use their own EIN number to bill for insurance for a treatment given by their assistant practitioner and then either keep a percentage (under the table) of the payout or defraud and simply forgo paying the assistant entirely

Overcharging insurance companies, i.e. having multiple fee schedules in a practice that bills insurance

Large practices advocating acupuncturists who are employees to dispense herbal medicine or nutraceuticals regardless of whether the patient needs them or not (a set price minimum was established – each patient was not to leave unless they had shelled out X amount of money)

And on and on and on ad nauseum.

A regular MD who engaged in any of these activities would either be removed from the case by their peers, disciplined, fired, or would lose their license to practice medicine entirely. Our industry seems to be just small enough, and off the radar enough for the time being, to get away with murder. As we grow as an industry this will no longer be the case, and this kind of idiocy happening on a wider stage can and will do irreparable harm to our field.

We have both toyed with the idea of writing blogs on this topic(s), and we may yet. However, we both feel that, as a senior practitioner and patriarch in our medicine, your words would have a much greater impact. We would love to see a blog on this.