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DETROIT (AP) – Mariah Martinez was 9 years old when she had bad news about her chronic headaches: a doctor said she was suffering from epilepsy.
Over the next four years, the suburban girl in Detroit took an anti-seizure medication that made her feel slow and sometimes attached to a machine that was recording her brain waves. She was told to avoid activities that could awaken her heart, making her a target of teasing by other children in school.
But another doctor announced an astonishing news in 2007: Mariah did not have epilepsy.
"How could that be?" his mother, Laura Abdel-Slater, recalled. "Epilepsy is not curable."
Martinez, who is now 26 years old, is the first of what could be many former patients to be tried, accusing Dr. Ybader Awaad and his former employer, Oakwood Healthcare, of malpractice and negligence. The selection of the jury starts on Monday.
Awaad ordered tests on hundreds of children in the Detroit area and deliberately misinterpreted the results, telling them that they were suffering from epilepsy or another convulsive disorder, said Martinez's lawyers. The diagnoses turned their lives upside down, forcing them to take medications they did not need and to undergo additional tests on repeat visits.
The attorneys claim that Oakwood was operating an "EEG mill", referring to an electroencephalogram, a test to measure brain activity. The Dearborn Medical Center was "delighted with Dr. Awaad's surprisingly high productivity because his only concern was to make money," they say in a recent report.
Epilepsy is a brain disorder that causes seizures, which are short changes in normal brain activity. Medicine is a common treatment, but nerve stimulation by an implanted device is sometimes another choice. According to US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 3 million people in the United States, or 1.2% of the population, have active epilepsy.
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