Veteran surgeons said he hacked around inside people’s bodies like a hyperactive child wielding
a scalpel. He left people paralyzed; he cut through arteries and didn’t seem to care as
blood flowed like a fountain; he maimed and he killed, and he was still allowed to operate.
How on Earth did this happen? That’s what we are going to find out today.
Christopher Duntsch’s surgeries were so bad, so utterly disturbing in their
seemingly pathological neglect of human life and human suffering, that some people who
witnessed his surgical disasters thought he must have been a sociopathic imposter.
But Mr. Duntsch was a real surgeon. It wasn’t as if he’d gotten his qualifications
from the University of the Spaghetti Monster degree mill. He wasn’t a complete imposter,
but as you’ll see, he was a sociopath. Duntsch was born in Montana in 1971,
and was brought up in Memphis, Tennessee. He and his three siblings were well taken care of. Their
pop, a physical therapist, and mom the teacher gave their children everything they needed.
Importantly, though, Christopher was the eldest sibling. He had something to
prove to Nathan, Matt, and Liz, and his parents. He wasn’t lacking in talent in high school, being
quite smart and showing a fairly high degree of skill in football. In fact, that’s what he wanted
to do at first, play football. But in college, even though he seemed to train harder than many
other players, he just didn’t cut the mustard. That was failure number one. The buds of his
insecurity started growing, and they were filled with poison.
It’s true that he attained an undergraduate degree in 1995 from Memphis State University.
It’s also true that he enrolled at the University of Tennessee
Health Science Center to take on a difficult qualification that combined an MD and Ph.D.
He then did a neurosurgical residency, but something went wrong here- instead of
completing the usual 1,000 operations that are usually undertaken, he did around 100,
although he was there for five years. So, on paper, it was looking as though Duntsch
was doing everything right, despite the lack of training. He could now put an MD on his resume,
but he also later added a doctorate in microbiology from St. Jude Children’s Research
Hospital. St. Jude didn’t even run that program. Success was more important than telling the truth.
That was becoming evident. He also raised millions of dollars
for research regarding stem cells and their application for curing injury and disease,
and on the back of two Russian scientists’ research, he created two companies. The husband of
the husband and wife team of Russian scientists would later say in regard to the discoveries,
“It wasn’t his invention. It was the invention of me and my wife, because we
made all primary experiments. We discovered it.” By the time he started hacking at people’s spines,
he had a CV that was 12 pages long. To some that looked at it, they thought,
what hasn’t this guy done. He’d studied, worked on research, and trained for around
15 years. He seemed vastly employable. Little did most people know, Christopher
Duntsch could add to that CV, perhaps in the “Hobbies and Interests” section: “Avid consumer
of recreational drugs with a preference for LSD and cocaine, especially cocaine.”
Duntsch, often with a childhood pal, Jerry Summers, would get high all night and then
he’d go to work with his mind adequately frazzled while wearing dirty scrubs. Summer put his neck on
the line for Duntsch many times in the figurative sense, and once, unfortunately, in the literal
sense. Dr. Death went to work on Summer’s neck injury that left the best friend a quadriplegic.
Summer trusted him, but he had no idea his buddy was far from the outstanding surgeon he pretended
to be. From his wheelchair, Summer later said, “Before my surgery, I didn’t know any bad outcomes
that he had.” A real surgeon later remarked on the surgery, saying, “Jerry Summers was
effectively decapitated during the operation.” He died in 2021 as a result of his condition.
It’s now time we talked some more about Duntsch’s horrific operations.
He was forced out of his company and then sued. He was now in debt. He also had a significant
problem with the devil’s dandruff. So, he used that qualification-spangled CV
to land himself a job as a neurosurgeon at the Baylor Regional Medical Center.
His salary was $600,000 a year. The problem was, as you know,
but they didn’t know, he wasn’t really qualified to work on spines.
Nonetheless, a vascular surgeon named Randall Kirby, who’d later file a complaint against
Duntsch, said all he heard Duntsch do was brag about how great a surgeon he was.
It was as if he talked a good game but played a very bad one.
Kenneth Fennell was Duntsch’s first patient. He was left paralyzed and was
only able to walk a short distance with a cane after a lot of rehabilitation.
The operation wasn’t a difficult one at all for a qualified surgeon.
With patient Lee Passmore, Duntsch cut through a ligament that was way off where he should have
been cutting. He also put a screw in the wrong place, which he twisted so much he
stripped the thread so it couldn’t be taken out. When Passmore’s two young kids and his friend
turned up at the hospital and aired their concern, Duntsch looked at them and said,
“Don’t worry about it.” Passmore now says he has no feeling in his feet,
and there are times when he’s incontinent. People who were there for that operation
could not believe what they had seen, but hey, this was the new guy with that amazing CV.
We won’t go into every patient, but suffice to say, Duntsch was dangerous. He used the wrong
surgical tools and hacked at nerves and bones. He cut through a major artery in one woman,
and blood spouted in the air. He was told she might die during the operation,
but he just carried on as if nothing had happened. The patient did eventually die.
Something like this might happen once in a lifetime for a surgeon,
but it wouldn’t happen a few times in such a short period. People can die during surgery, but not
usually as a result of total, absolute negligence. To onlookers in the operating room, Duntsch seemed
about as skilled at surgery as you would be after watching a few YouTube videos on spine surgery.
He was accused of being drunk on the job, but when his blood was tested for alcohol, he passed.
Still, a friend later said that Duntsch would party all night on booze and cocaine
and then just waltz into work to perform possibly life-changing surgeries. She said, “I thought it
was pretty amazing that he was even able to go to work the next day. Like, he wasn’t scared.”
How did he not get arrested or at least fired there and then? That’s the big question,
and it is now one a lot of Americans are asking since they don’t want
their bodies ruined by a crazed surgeon. Duntsch did have his surgical privileges revoked
at that first hospital and he was reviewed, but to prevent an expensive legal battle,
the hospital allowed him to resign rather than risk getting sued by him for unfair dismissal.
That’s how it all went wrong, stage one. He started working at Dallas Medical Center and
was granted some privileges to perform surgeries. The hospital still wanted to hear from Baylor and
so wouldn’t yet grant Duntsch full privileges. He didn’t get those privileges because within
one week of being there he killed a woman named Floella Brown after cutting through
her vertebral artery. The next day he operated on Mary Efurd. He wanted to drill into her head,
even though he wasn’t qualified to do so. He puts screws in the wrong place. He severed
her nerves, and he didn’t remove the disc he was supposed to remove. In short, he went at her like
a child in the game “Operation” and there were lots of beeps. In this case, the beeps were his
colleagues saying what the hell are you doing. Some of them later said they thought he was high.
When another surgeon, Robert Henderson, went in to try and correct the damage, he said it looked like
Duntsch had been playing with “Tinkertoys.” He called the operation an “assault.”
In fact, he was so shocked at what he saw, he said this man had to be an imposter.
No surgeon in the world, the entire world, could make a mess like that.
Nonetheless, since Duntsch was only there on a temporary basis, the hospital didn’t
have to report him. That could be a hassle, so Duntsch just moved on. As you now realize,
while he is the outright villain of this story, some blame can be put on the hospitals,
too. As Pontius Pilot did with Jesus, they washed their hands of him.
Duntsch managed to land more gigs at the South Hampton Community Hospital in Dallas,
and at a clinic called the Legacy Surgery Center in Frisco, also in Texas.
His ad hoc surgeries left one man without feeling in his right side,
and another man paralyzed from the neck down. Even with this huge tally of disaster to his name,
he’d still walk around saying things like, “Everybody is doing it wrong. I’m the only
clean minimally invasive guy in the whole state.” He operated on Jacqueline Troy and as well as
cutting through an artery, he severed her vocal cords. This kind of thing was unheard of in the
history of modern surgery. Shortly after, with another patient, he thought a muscle
was a tumor. He cut through an artery with this guy and again severed the vocal cords.
Dr. Kirby, who we mentioned earlier, saw what had happened. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He called
Duntsch a “maniac” and said he was either trying to decapitate the patient or kill him some other
way. He added that such reckless mistakes had never been seen in the history of US medical care.
And it’s this man Kirby as well as Dr. Henderson that are the heros of this story.
They saw what was happening, although as much as they warned people and complained to hospitals,
they couldn’t get Duntsch arrested or even have his license taken away from him.
But then at last, they finally managed to persuade the Texas
Medical Board to suspend Duntsch's license. Even then, Duntsch was still trying to get his
hands on more patients. He still believed he was the best out there, a delusion of grandeur likely
a consequence of doing 8-balls of cocaine during the evenings. That was evident in emails he sent,
which sounded like he was trying to come across as some kind of medical rapper.
In one email, he wrote that he was a “supernova sophisticated savant” and on top
of the alliteration, he said, I “do my thing, build my empire, party, and BEEP with models
without knowing their names, to make money.” In yet another email, he was less lyrical,
saying “Anyone close to me thinks that I likely am something between God, Einstein,
and the antichrist.” In another email, he was more honest, stating, “I am one of a kind,
a mother-BEEPING stone-cold killer that can buy or own or steal or ruin or build whatever he wants.”
That would come back to bite him. The only thing he had in common with
some rappers was his perpetual drug abuse (now with the added use of Oxycontin and
Xanax) and a history of violence, although no rapper could touch him on his violence record.
But Kirby rapped back, writing in a report that this doctor was a “clear and present danger to
the citizens of Texas.” He and Henderson by this time had even gone back to where Duntsch had
done his residency and showed a picture of him to his former supervisors. Kirby and Henderson
thought someone had to have been pretending to be Duntsch. No one could be that bad.
But it was him. There was no imposter. The people that had trained him said they knew
of nothing to Duntsch’s detriment. This didn’t ring true for the two surgeons.
Henderson later said, “Could he have permanent brain damage from either chemicals or from some
organic reason, meaning a tumor? Or is this just a sociologic, pathologic personality that has
flipped and become a destroyer instead of healer?” Still, the board only suspended his license,
not completely revoked it. What is going on here, thought Henderson and Kirby. There was
enough evidence to prove that Duntsch wasn’t just the worst surgeon the world had ever seen
but that he was likely an outright psychopath with a willingness to kill.
Then a reporter in Dallas named Brett Shipp got hold of the story.
He too couldn’t believe what he’d found out. He also went after Duntsch. The board subsequently
asked a very well-respected surgeon to review Duntsch’s operations. He almost had an apoplectic
fit reading about the bloody disasters. Just in one case alone, he said,
there was enough proof to be certain that Dr. Duntsch didn’t know what he was doing.
He said it was an impossibility for a neurosurgeon not to know when someone was bleeding out,
as had happened with Duntsch one time. The board finally revoked Duntsch’s medical
license, but that had taken way too long for Dr. Henderson and Dr. Kirby. There was a reason.
Henderson was recorded talking to one of the board’s investigators when he asked her how could
Duntsch still be practicing. She answered: “Sometimes we know that someone’s bad,
but when it comes to taking them to a hearing and proving it to where we can actually do
some disciplinary action, it takes time of gathering evidence. Unfortunately,
sometimes it takes longer than we want.” Too right it did. There are people who’d
still be walking if he’d been stopped earlier. We found other cases that involved malpractice
by surgeons. They weren’t anywhere near the level of horrors committed by Duntsch,
but they too involved slow investigations. Kirby said with Duntsch, the action should have
happened sooner. He was a special case, but maybe Duntsch was so bad that no one could believe it.
Kirby said in an interview, “This is a once-in-a-generation
occurrence, that we have someone off the rails this bad—this is why no one saw this coming.”
Also, let’s remember that A-grade resume of Duntsch’s. Let us also recall that Duntsch
had an amazing marketing team. He appeared on TV commercials looking and sounding like the man you
would want to remove a disc from your back. Even if people looked at doctors’ ratings on websites,
he scored a 4.5 rating out of 5. A doctor like that was worth millions to the hospitals that
hired him, possibly 2.5 million bucks a year. Nonetheless, at least six doctors complained
to the board about Duntsch. Some of them were almost hysterical when they told the
board that this man must be stopped. In December 2013, he finally was. But
that didn’t mean Duntsch was behind bars, far from it. The lunatic was still on the
loose. He was getting weirder, too. He moved to Denver, where in 2014,
he was arrested for trying to get into the house of his ex-partner, with whom he had a kid.
Then he was arrested again for stealing stuff from Walmart worth $887.30. He shoplifted five
pairs of sunglasses, a bunch of watches, some shoes, ties, some cologne, and a walkie-talkie.
He was then broke. He had cracked it seems and was picked up one day by police wandering
around and subsequently taken to a psychiatric hospital to be evaluated. He needed it. He was
also picked up driving a car with two flat tires. That time he was charged with a DUI.
One time again when trying to get close to his ex, she found him in her apartment covered in blood.
Dressed in his scrubs, he told her he’d had a tussle with some medical investigators, but that
wasn’t true. We don’t know what happened to him. In July 2015, he was indicted for causing an
injury to an elderly person as well as five counts of assault. At the time of his arrest,
he was staying in a hotel. Later in court, his lawyers argued that the fault lay with those who’d
trained him, but that was a very weak defense. The prosecution pulled out some of his
rapper-esque emails, showing the jury that “stone-cold killer” message. The jury was
unanimous in saying that Duntsch was guilty of “intentionally or knowingly causing serious
bodily injury to an elderly individual.” Duntsch made US history, becoming the first
surgeon to have been found guilty on criminal charges for his work.
He was given that life sentence, but for some, there was a bigger problem than Duntsch.
One neurosurgeon said, “The conditions which created Dr. Duntsch still exist, thereby making
it possible for another to come along.” In total, he injured, sometimes severely,
33 out of 38 of his patients. Two people died as a result of his insane actions.
Some victims were compensated for what had happened, but this wasn’t about money.
One of them said it was more about getting him off the streets. “The public needed to know that there
was a monster out there,” the victim said. Unfortunately, as you watch this,
some people are in a wheelchair or using crutches or are no longer in this world
because a scalpel-wielding maniac was able to fool some people into thinking the devil didn’t exist.
Duntsch will be eligible for parole in 2045, at which point he’ll be 75.
Now you need to watch “What If You Wake Up During Surgery?” Or,
have a look at “Doctors Do The Unthinkable - Removing The Wrong Body Parts!”