Longer suspension sought for Indiana doctor

MIDDLETOWN, Ind. (AP) — The Indiana Medical Licensing Board is being asked to consider a longer suspension for a doctor who state officials say wrote prescriptions that caused or contributed to the overdose deaths of nine patients.

The board last month approved an emergency 90-day suspension for Dr. Phillip Foley of Middletown after the state attorney general's office said he recklessly prescribed painkillers and sedatives.

Foley has defended his practice, saying he always made sure his patients had legitimate problems before prescribing medications.

Attorney general's office spokeswoman Molly Butters said it would seek an extension of Foley's suspension when the licensing board meets Thursday in Indianapolis.

The son of a woman who was a patient of Foley's said he believed it was time for the state to take away his medical license.

Rob Shrock, of Warren, said his mother, Geri Shrock Brown, of Marion, was prescribed anti-anxiety and painkiller medications by Foley. She was 62 when she died in 2006, days after she was hospitalized for an overdose.

"We found her on the floor," Shrock told The Herald Bulletin of Anderson. "I'd been trying to get my mom away from him for years and she just wouldn't do it because she wanted her medication."

Dozens of Foley's former patients have come to his defense.

Kim Frazier, of Chesterfield, said Foley was being wrongly accused and she and other former patients were suffering because of it.

"That doctor is so much more than just a doctor," Frazier said. "I need thyroid medicine. I need polymyalgia medicine. I need my diabetes medicine. I can't find another doctor."

Frazier said that when she tells doctors that she was a patient of Foley, "they say, 'Maybe in a couple of months I might take you.'"

State officials told the licensing board in October that Foley wrote about 96,000 original prescriptions — those excluding refills — between Jan. 1, 2005 and May 31, 2008, which was more prescriptions by volume than any other doctor in Indiana.

The attorney general's office says nine people died from drug overdoses between 2004 and 2009 after Foley regularly prescribed them a variety of painkillers, depressants, muscle relaxants and other medications, often without examining them or screening them for drugs.

Foley didn't go inside the meeting room in October as the licensing board considered his case. The board turned down a request from Foley's lawyer, Mark Rutherford, that the doctor be allowed to surrender his license and agree not to apply for a medical license in another state.

A message seeking comment on whether Foley would contest the longer suspension was left at Rutherford's office on Friday.

« Health

Share