CA physician pleads guilty to elder abuse

A urologist whoperformed a painful cancer treatment on a patient who didn’t have thedisease has pleaded guilty to felony charges of elder abuse andinsurance fraud.  Ali Moayed, 41, of Monte Sereno is facing up to one year in jail undera plea agreement with Santa Clara County prosecutors. Moayed – whoentered the guilty plea Friday – will be formally sentenced March 7. Hehas already surrendered his medical license.  Moayed created fake lab reports indicating that three of his patientssuffered from prostate cancer, which they didn’t have, according tocourt documents.  Another doctor reviewing Moayed’s files in 2005 noticed that apathology report – the document that would contain the cancer diagnosis- was missing from the file for a patient about to undergo treatment.When radiation oncologist Abhinand Peddada finally got the report, hesaw that the report from the lab said something different than thedocument from Moayed’s Los Gatos office.  The lab said the patient never had prostate cancer.  Peddada canceled a painful procedure, called brachytherapy, for thepatient and a second man. But the conflicting reports weren’tdiscovered until 87-year-old Dung Le had already undergone theprocedure, which involves sedating the patient and insertingradioactive seeds the size of a rice grains into the prostate gland.

Source:  San Jose Mercury-News,  http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_8126625?nclick_check=1