MD should lose licence for sexual abuse: College
Rheumatologist found guilty of lewd remarks and touching
Warning: this article includes graphic details. The doctor asked the patient if she and her husband had oral sex and anal sex, and about sexual positions they engaged in. Except this was not sex therapy. Dr. Martin Lee, who practised in Mississauga and Pickering, is a rheumatologist, a specialist who deals with disorders involving the joints, such as arthritis.
The patient has fibromyalgia, a condition that includes chronic pain. She was seeing Lee once or twice a week for trigger point injections. She was not only subjected to questions about her sex life, but she also had to listen to Lee volunteer details about his own.
He would talk about “things of a sexual nature that I guess he wasn’t satisfied . . . Frequency, and I guess methods or types of positions that he would engage in with his wife or wanted to,” the woman, identified only as Patient A, testified at Lee’s discipline hearing at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario.
She also testified that during Gay Pride Week, Lee showed her a gay pornographic magazine and asked “What is S&M? What do they get from it? How could two men do that?”
Earlier this year, a discipline panel found Lee guilty of the sexual abuse of a patient due to his remarks to Patient A, as well as for making sexual remarks and rubbing his groin up against another woman, Patient C. In a move that demonstrates the college’s toughening stance on all forms of sexual abuse by physicians, the medical regulator’s lawyer argued on Tuesday at Lee’s penalty hearing that the panel should revoke Lee’s licence.
Morgana Kellythorne acknowledged before the fivemember panel that while revocation is mandatory under the law for certain acts of sexual abuse of patients, it is not mandatory for the acts committed by Lee.
Even a bill currently moving through the legislature that would add to the list of acts of sexual abuse requiring mandatory revocation does not include the acts committed by Lee, his lawyer told the panel.
There is also no previous discipline case involving similar issues where the physician’s licence was yanked. Instead, the physicians have typically been suspended.
But Kellythorne said the panel still has the discretion to revoke. They should depart from previous decisions and impose a tougher penalty in line with society’s shifting views and expectations on sexual abuse by health professionals, she said.
“Revocation will convey to the public and the profession that a member who engages in such exploitation will not be tolerated,” she said Tuesday. “The practice of medicine is a privilege, not a right.”
She said the patients were vulnerable women with chronic conditions who depended on Lee for treatment. Patient A said in a victim impact statement that she was confused following Lee’s remarks, and “dreaded every encounter and appointment.”
She was worried about complaining for fear “that other doctors would think I’m a troublemaker and not want to treat me.” (The college began investigating following a mandatory report from Patient A’s family doctor.)
“So what this situation has taught me is that it’s easier to not trust, even your doctors,” she said.
Lee, who denied the allegations against him, was also found guilty of professional misconduct for asking Patient A to pay cash for prescriptions and asking her to videotape or photograph other patients after she told him about seeing a patient trying to sell her medication downtown.
Patient C testified that Lee had asked her questions like, “Is your husband’s c--- big?” and “Can he still put it in your p----?”
Lee’s lawyer, Mark Veneziano, argued on Tuesday for a six-month suspension and a requirement that Lee only practise on women in the presence of a chaperone for the next two years, as he is already required to do.
Much attention was focused on a recent Divisional Court ruling that was heavily critical of the college’s discipline committee when it comes to punishing physicians for sexual abuse.
In that case, the court found the discipline committee’s six-month suspension of Dr. Javad Peirovy, who had sexually abused four female patients by groping them, to be “clearly unfit.” The court sent the case back to the committee to try again. (Peirovy, a Toronto doctor, has since been granted leave to appeal the Divisional Court decision to the Court of Appeal.)
After reviewing previous college cases involving penalties for sexual abuse, Justice James Ramsay, writing for the three-judge Divisional Court panel, said:
“The facts of these cases are base. It is depressing to review them. They do little to encourage confidence in the committee’s approach to eradicating sexual abuse in the profession. Consistency in the imposition of sentence is a proper consideration, but a litany of clearly unfit penalties does not justify the penalty imposed in the present case.”
The Divisional Court ruling has already been brought up by the college’s lawyers in at least two discipline hearings, including Lee’s, to show panels it’s time to move past previous decisions and impose much harsher penalties for a wider array of acts of sexual abuse.
The other discipline hearing involved a doctor who began an intimate relationship with a patient within weeks of ending their professional relationship. The college wants to revoke the licence of Dr. Nagi Ghabbour, who pleaded guilty to conduct that would be regarded as disgraceful, dishonourable or unprofessional. The panel’s decision in that case is pending.
On Tuesday, Veneziano, Lee’s lawyer, sought to convince the discipline panel that they should still order a penalty that would be within the range used in previous cases involving issues similar to Lee’s case.
“Most importantly, one cannot and should not throw out years and years of precedent from this body because three judges thought the imposition of a penalty in this one case was unreasonable,” he argued.
“(The Divisional Court ruling) does not throw out what this panel has been doing for years and years.”
Aside from revocation, the college is also seeking to have Lee post a letter of credit for $32,000 to cover therapy costs for the two patients, should they require it, and pay $25,000 in costs for his discipline hearing.
The panel reserved its judgment on penalty.