Cancer patient abuse

[Guest guest]

http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/15651692.htm

When prosecutors here talked about the cruelty of E. Curran, it was the

face of Alves they saw.

The young woman, who, at 18, was a filmmaker, photographer and model, was

described by her mother as " born with wings. " She was also dying of ovarian

cancer.

Curran, who billed himself as a natural healer and physician, told her he could

make her healthy with a green drink, a concoction of powdered vegetables in

water. The promise of recovery led her to spend her final weeks refusing other

food.

" He did so much harm on so many levels, " Rhonda Alves, 's mother, said

recently. " I don't blame Curran for dying. What I blame Curran

for is the anguish he brought to her life. "

In August, Curran, who charged most patients a standard fee of $10,000 for his

treatments, was sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison on charges of wire fraud and

money laundering.

Curran, 41, followed the same course of study as two men who appeared on the

Kentucky medical scene: E. and Larry Lammers.

was welcomed to Lexington's Central Baptist Hospital in 2003 and briefly

observed heart specialists there treating patients.

In 2004, Lammers cared for patients at several accident injury clinics in the

state. Lammers and have also been convicted of practicing medicine

without a license and have received jail sentences.

Curran, and Lammers all worked toward medical degrees from online

schools that were promoted from the remote mountain community of Falcon, Ky.

There, sitting at a computer, was the man behind the schools -- J.

Arnett, 47, who had been a Free Will Baptist minister before becoming involved

in the medical field, court records say.

Arnett first opened several medical clinics in Eastern Kentucky, where he worked

without a license as an assistant to the very doctors he hired. When the clinics

closed, he moved on to promoting various online schools that offered degrees in

medicine and naturopathy -- a system of healing with natural substances. The

schools were neither accredited nor licensed.

Yet the people who received degrees from the schools that Arnett promoted opened

real clinics, practiced in real offices and treated real patients.

In a private practice near Providence, for example, Curran " told healthy people

they were sick and critically ill people that he could heal them, " said Bruce W.

McIntyre, an attorney for the Rhode Island Board of Health. " His level of greed

was only exceeded by his cruelty. "

There is controversy over whether the schools Arnett was associated with were

" diploma mills, " Internet Web sites that award a degree based on money and

little work. According to a number of states that investigate such sites, they

were. According to those associated with them, they were not. There is no

national or Kentucky agency that monitors online schools.

Diploma mills generally have no faculty, little or no course work and either no

physical campuses or inadequate ones.

There are scores of accredited colleges and universities that offer online

courses and degrees. But many diploma mills have sophisticated Web sites that

look no different from those of legitimate schools.

Arnett has been investigated by state officials for more than a decade but never

prosecuted. He has been free to open clinics, assist physicians and place

would-be doctors in hospitals and clinics.

He declined to comment for this article and has not responded to telephone

calls, certified letters or e-mail messages. When a reporter knocked on his

door, he refused to answer any questions and threatened to call the police. The

man he identified as his attorney, C. Tom of Pikeville, also did not

respond to repeated requests for comment.

The most prominent of the schools Arnett has been associated with is St. Luke

School of Medicine, which has had a number of incarnations. St. Luke and its

Southern Graduate Institute -- a division that focused on naturopathy -- are

central to the criminal cases against Curran, and Lammers.

Arnett was also tied to Lady Malina Memorial Medical College; the University of

Sciences, Arts and Technology, with an address on the volcanic island of

Montserrat in the Caribbean; and the Asian-American University.

Alan Contreras, administrator of the Oregon Office of Degree Authorization, said

he would describe St. Luke as " a degree mill because it never had legitimate

approval. "

Prosecutors say that the degrees that Lammers, Curran and received while

Arnett was involved with St. Luke were bogus.

St. Luke President Jerroll Dolphin, contacted in Liberia, West Africa, said

Arnett had been affiliated with the school and that, at one point, the two

planned to establish a school in Kentucky. However, when Dolphin received calls

from people he didn't know were students, he suspected that Arnett was granting

St. Luke diplomas without the appropriate course work.

In 2003, the two men severed their relationship and Dolphin said he revoked

Arnett's honorary medical degree.

" St. Luke School of Medicine has never sold diplomas in exchange for money and a

simple quiz, and never will, " Dolphin said.

St. Luke provides an intensive education and is a real medical school, not a

diploma mill, he said. Dolphin is attempting to attract new students to Liberia,

where he has plans for a large campus.

Currently, Arnett has a license from West Virginia to practice acupuncture and

massage therapy, and is listed as having a degree in " Oriental Medicine. " He

also has naturopathy licenses from two of the only places in the country that

award them Ð the District of Columbia and Bingham County, Idaho.

The court cases against Curran, and Lammers continue to play out.

Despite Curran's being listed on the St. Luke Web site as a graduate of the

school, Dolphin said he had not been granted a degree. As for , he was

dismissed from the school when he got into criminal trouble. Dolphin said

Lammers had finished the course work but wasn't granted a degree because he

illegally posed as a physician.

Dolphin said that, at one point, St. Luke had more than 300 students, but bad

publicity has reduced that number to fewer than 30. Web sites show that at least

a dozen people on the Internet list a naturopathy degree from St. Luke. Some are

still treating patients around the country.

Piecing the story together

Falcon, Ky., about 180 miles from Lexington in Magoffin County, is little more

than a post office and a smattering of homes and businesses.

It's an unlikely site for a medical school.

From that area of Eastern Kentucky, Arnett spent the better part of 25

years pursuing health care jobs and businesses. The threads of his story have

been pulled from depositions that were part of a now-dismissed civil lawsuit

filed against him for non-payment for medical equipment, from records of the

Kentucky medical licensing board and from other court cases.

Arnett started working in Eastern Kentucky medical clinics and doctors' offices

in 1978.

Arnett said he had a master's degree in health administration and a bachelor's

degree from Clayton College of Natural Health in Birmingham, Ala., a

distance-learning school. A 1999 Clayton alumni newsletter said he was a Doctor

of Naturopathy.

When an attorney in the civil lawsuit suggested that distance learning was just

another name for a correspondence course, Arnett bristled.

" I did it through the Internet; I did it through the mail; I did it through

teleconference, " Arnett said.

He said that he was a certified medical assistant and a licensed X-ray

technician and that he had a doctor's degree in natural medicine.

Arnett said that he was always honest about his degrees and that they were all

legitimate. However, various state agencies have investigated him for years for

posing as either a medical assistant or a physician's assistant.

In 1988, the Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure denied him a license as a

physician's assistant and warned him not to " hold himself out " as one.

The board sent him a letter a few years later when he was fired as a physician's

assistant after only two weeks because the doctor was suspicious of his

qualifications.

Arnett was practicing medicine without a license, board officials told the Pike

County attorney's office in a 1993 letter.

C. , the county attorney at the time, who is now in private

practice, said he has never heard of Arnett and doesn't remember the complaint.

" If they had come to me with a complaint, we would have written a warrant and

taken it to the judge, " he said. " No question about it. " He added that, at that

time, the county attorney's office had no investigative staff.

After he was fired, Arnett applied to be a masseur at the Perfect 10 tanning

parlor in Pikeville.

At about the same time, Arnett began opening clinics in Eastern Kentucky and

hiring doctors. He would then persuade those same doctors to hire him as a

physician's assistant. At one point, he claimed he had worked for eight doctors

as an assistant.

In August 1997, the board again received a complaint that Arnett was working as

a physician's assistant without a license, this time at the Big Sandy Medical

Clinic in Prestonsburg, which he said he owned. In fact, he said he had

ownership interests in four other clinics in Eastern Kentucky: Big Sandy Primary

Care Clinic, East Kentucky Primary Care Clinic, Kentucky Primary Care Clinic and

Kentucky Pulmonary Diagnostics.

When asked specifically about his state license for being a medical or

physician's assistant in a deposition, Arnett acknowledged that he did not have

one.

In 1998, the state received complaints about the Value Care Clinic in Van Lear,

Ky., which was open for only a few months while Arnett ran it. One complaint

said Arnett had given an EKG to a 14-year-old girl who had mild sore throat

symptoms. Another said he'd charged for services that weren't provided.

" A complaint alleges that Arnett passed himself off as a medical doctor and as a

physician's assistant, changing the physician's order and submitting bills to

Medicaid and other insurance carriers for various lab tests that are not

medically necessary, " wrote W. Wade, an investigator in the state's

Office of Inspector General.

Although Value Care had already closed, Wade reported that he feared Arnett was

" running the same scam " at Big Sandy.

No action was taken.

Arnett said in the deposition that by 2000, he had limited his work to taking

vital signs and carrying out administrative duties. But he said the doctors he

worked for gave him leeway: " A medical assistant can do whatever the physicians

allows him to do as long as he countersigns the work, " Arnett said. " If you are

working with doctors that I have in the past, that doesn't really care what they

do and gives anybody anything they ask for, you know, it's kind of irrelevant to

say what you can do. "

The Kentucky Cabinet for Health Services told local, state and federal

prosecutors that Arnett altered records in order to bill Medicaid $2,800 for

services that physicians did not order at Value Care.

U.S. Attorney Joe Famularo forwarded the complaint to the Federal Bureau of

Investigation in 1999.

No action was taken.

A 'skeletal education'

While working in the medical clinics in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky,

Arnett also became the president of an organization called the Kentucky State

Naturopathic Association. The association, based at Arnett's Big Sandy Medical

Clinic, was accepting new members for $50 and had its own certification board, a

1999 Clayton alumni newsletter said.

Arnett was on a state task force to craft new alternative medicine laws in the

late 1990s. Also in the group were several physicians, lawmakers and Todd

Leatherman, chief medical investigator for the Attorney General's office.

Leatherman and others on the panel can't remember what led to Arnett's

appointment, and no laws were passed as a result of the task force, which met 13

times and issued a report in January 2000.

In 2003, Churchman, a Louisville acupuncturist and a member of the state

naturopathic association, became concerned about Arnett's operations. When he

confronted Arnett about the quality of the education that he was providing

through his online schools, Arnett grew defensive and said he " owned " the

Kentucky Naturopathic Association.

Churchman said that he and other members disbanded the group that Arnett led and

started the Kentucky Association of Naturopathic Physicians, which now has 35

members.

" He was offering a skeletal education, " said Churchman of Arnett's online

schools. When one of Arnett's students came to him looking for a clinical

placement, Churchman said, he found that the student " wasn't well-versed in

anatomy and physiology. "

A campus in Liberia

By 2002, Arnett was forming new Internet medical schools, according to state

records.

He incorporated a company called Foreign Alternative Medical Education, as well

as St. Luke School of Medicine. Both had a Falcon, Ky., address that Arnett

used.

Not long afterward, Irving, a student from one of Arnett's online

schools, was warned by the state medical licensing board to close a medical

practice he had begun in town, according to board documents.

Irving said he received a doctor of naturopathy degree from Southern Graduate

Institute, a division of St. Luke, in 2001. His contact was Arnett. Irving did

six-week rotations for orthopedics, physical rehabilitation and anesthesiology

at an Accident Injury Center in Lexington where Larry Lammers worked.

In 2005, Irving said he was still studying at St. Luke and was pleased with the

education he received.

Irving, Curran, Lammers and have all said they thought they were

receiving a legitimate medical education from schools Arnett was promoting.

's use of his so-called education was particularly egregious. He

practiced medicine without a license for two years in Las Vegas before he came

to Kentucky. He supervised potentially dangerous injections for MRI patients and

told patients he had trained at s Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Last year, when Las Vegas District Judge Valorie Vega sentenced to six

months in jail, she had another way of describing the way he had used that

education:

" This was a time bomb ticking, " she said.

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