THE TROUBLE WITH DOCTORS

Anderson, an Australia-based physician specializing in obstetrics and gynecology, offers an exhaustive report on deceptive and destructive doctors.

In this posthumously published book, the author details instances of health care fraud, deceptive practices, and other frightening behaviors of physicians around the world. These stories tell of medical doctors who claimed an unproven link between vaccines and autism, who performed unnecessary surgeries to line their pockets, or who freely prescribed medications that allowed the opioid crisis to take hold in the United States. Other stories highlight doctors who used their medical licenses to play God, such as the “Egg Thief,” who allegedly removed eggs from women without their consent or knowledge and then implanted them in other women, or another who, Anderson says, put patients with psychological issues in medically induced comas, used electric-shock treatment on them, and then fraudulently billed them. Then there’s the shocking story of an Australian obstetrician whom local media called the “Butcher of Bega,” who was brought up on charges of sexual abuse and genital mutilation of women. Anderson’s end-noted research is impressive, and each chapter is meticulously detailed. What’s missing however, is a vivid narrative style that might have made his subjects feel more fleshed-out. Readers of other medical true-crime works, such as John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood (2018) or Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test (2011), will find this volume relatively dry in its reportage. Chapters on more notorious cases offer the most compelling reads, as they use quotes from previously published sources to paint richer pictures of greed, deceit, and evil; at one point, for instance, the author quotes an official commission calling a doctor “two-faced, devious, dissembling and unprincipled.” He leaves readers with his thoughts on how to prevent similar situations in the future, looking at the system holistically. However, the work as a whole barely scratches the surface of how deep changes could be made.

An intriguing work of true-crime nonfiction but one that lacks a detailed prescription for the problems it raises.