Another cancer fraud?

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It's pretty low to fake cancer to receive money, sympathy or attention. But CNN is reporting that an oncologist in Michigan is being charged with fraud for telling people they had cancer when they didn't and profiting from the unnecessary treatments, among other complaints. He's being accused of pocketing about $35 million over two years in false Medicare claims. Employees of the clinic, including another oncologist and nurses, have stepped forward with claims of abuse and neglect (complaint), but it breaks my heart to know this may have gone on for so long. Did it really take two years to finally charge this man? He's being officially accused of healthcare fraud, but reading over the witness accounts, I suspect there will be many more charges and lawsuits to come. Some of the charges he's being accused of include:-Administering unnecessary chemotherapy to patients in remission

-Deliberate misdiagnosis of patients to justify giving expensive treatment

-Administering chemotherapy to end-of-life patients who would not benefit

-Deliberate misdiagnosis of patients to justify testing

-Deliberate misdiagnosis of anemia to justify treatmentsFor many patients, they must now wait for their medical records to be returned from the FBI and begin the search for another doctor. We talk about the dangers of overtreatment and overscreening, but my goodness...I'm just floored.

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For patients with cancer, the ongoing chemotherapy shortage may cause some anxiety as they wonder how they will receive their drugs. However, measuring drugs “down to the minutiae of the milligrams” helped patients receive the drugs they needed, said Alison Tray. Tray is an advanced oncology certified nurse practitioner and current vice president of ambulatory operations at Rutgers Cancer Institute in New Jersey.  If patients are concerned about getting their cancer drugs, Tray noted that having “an open conversation” between patients and providers is key.  “As a provider and a nurse myself, having that conversation, that reassurance and sharing the information is a two-way conversation,” she said. “So just knowing that we're taking care of you, we're going to make sure that you receive the care that you need is the key takeaway.” In June 2023, many patients were unable to receive certain chemotherapy drugs, such as carboplatin and cisplatin because of an ongoing shortage. By October 2023, experts saw an improvement, although the “ongoing crisis” remained.  READ MORE: Patients With Lung Cancer Face Unmet Needs During Drug Shortages “We’re really proud of the work that we could do and achieve that through a critical drug shortage,” Tray said. “None of our patients missed a dose of chemotherapy and we were able to provide that for them.” Tray sat down with CURE® during the 49th Annual Oncology Nursing Society Annual Congress to discuss the ongoing chemo shortage and how patients and care teams approached these challenges. Transcript: Particularly at Hartford HealthCare, when we established this infrastructure, our goal was to make sure that every patient would get the treatment that they need and require, utilizing the data that we have from ASCO guidelines to ensure that we're getting the optimal high-quality standard of care in a timely fashion that we didn't have to delay therapies. So, we were able to do that by going down to the minutiae of the milligrams on hand, particularly when we had a lot of critical drug shortages. So it was really creating that process to really ensure that every patient would get the treatment that they needed. For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.
Yuliya P.L Linhares, MD, an expert on CLL
Yuliya P.L Linhares, MD, and Josie Montegaard, MSN, AGPCNP-BC, experts on CLL
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