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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.
Awaad was Oakwood's first pediatric neurologist when he was hired in 1999. In nearly a decade, his annual salary went from $ 185,000 to $ 300,000. He also got a bonus of up to $ 220,000 if certain billing goals were met, according to the documents.
Awaad left Oakwood in 2007 for a job in Saudi Arabia. When his former patients visited new doctors, many diagnoses were reversed. Even other doctors consulted by defense lawyers said that he had misinterpreted the EEG tests.
"If I made a mistake, I was proposing a diagnosis to the best of my abilities," Awaad told attorney Brian McKeen during a quarrelsome filing in 2017. "It's a different story from that of telling them intentionally that you are epileptic and that they do not do epilepsy. "
Oakwood merged with Beaumont Health in 2014, several years after the filing of the first lawsuit.
"Although we can not comment on the details of this case because of pending court proceedings and patient privacy laws, we continue to believe that patients have been treated appropriately," he said. Beaumont spokesman Mark Geary.
In 2012, Awaad reached an agreement with the state control authorities to resolve the charges that he unnecessarily administered anti-seizure medications to four children. He paid a $ 10,000 fine and agreed to have his work reviewed by another doctor for a period of time.
Lawyers representing approximately 300 former patients have lost their intention to make this case a clbad action. The first trial will therefore focus solely on Martinez, who was sent to Awaad in 2003 to treat his headaches. She was given Lamictal, an anti-epileptic drug, and Awaad performed many follow-up EEGs until another doctor said she was not suffering from epilepsy.
Martinez's lawyers refused to make her available for a pre-trial interview. But in a statement, she remembers being removed from her childhood and teased by other children because the epilepsy etiquette limited her physical activities. She said that her notes have suffered.
"Once I was weaned off medication, my headaches became less common, less severe," Martinez said.
Oakwood lawyers asked the judge to hold a separate trial for the medical center, but he refused.
"You can not just look at the malpractice and not decide whether Oakwood should have and could have stopped what was happening," said Wayne County Judge Robert Colombo Jr., who called for some evidence evidence "very overwhelming".
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Follow Ed White on Twitter: https://twitter.com/edwhiteap
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