Health News--The Washington Post: >>>THE DOCTOR YOU DON'T KNOW
By Sandra G. Boodman
Tuesday , June 13, 2000 ; Z12
To a patient in search of a doctor, David Taylor Schwartz might seem an ideal candidate.
A graduate of Harvard College and Columbia University School of Medicine who trained at two of New York's most prestigious hospitals and was awarded a National Institutes of Health research fellowship, the 63-year-old board-certified urologist has had a teaching appointment at the George Washington University School of Medicine for many years. A solo practitioner, Schwartz is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons, has offices in McLean and Alexandria and is one of the specialists recommended by Inova Health System's physician referral service. Look him up in the latest directory of Aetna U.S. Healthcare, one of about half a dozen health plans in which Schwartz says he participates, and you'll discover that he practices at four local hospitals, including two of the most prestigious: the Washington Hospital Center and Inova Fairfax Hospital. Call the medical boards of Virginia and the District of Columbia and you'll be told he has full, unrestricted medical licenses. His seven-page curriculum vitae lists 39 medical journal articles, including a 1965 New England Journal of Medicine article written when he was a resident, intriguingly titled "Trichinosis from New England Bear Meat."
Some patients might be drawn to a recent ad in The Washington Post Health section for the National Capitol Foundation for Sexual Dysfunction "and its director David Schwartz... [who] has helped thousands of men and couples with sexual dysfunction."
But a more complete, and much less laudatory, portrait of Schwartz -- one that details his felony conviction for income tax evasion and subsequent imprisonment in 1982 followed by the automatic revocations of several medical licenses, the termination of his privileges at half a dozen hospitals for negligence or incompetence, three recent malpractice settlements or jury verdicts totaling more than $6 million and his recent Chapter 11 bankruptcy -- would be nearly impossible for a consumer to obtain.
Many of those details can be pieced together from thousands of pages of documents located in the files of five courthouses in the Washington area, as well as medical boards in Virginia, the District, New York and New Jersey.
The National Practitioner Data Bank, the federal government's repository of disciplinary action and malpractice payments, contains some details of Schwartz's history. But consumers are barred by law from checking the databank, which is supposed to be queried regularly by hospitals, managed care organizations and other professional groups that credential and police doctors.
Only by searching the files in numerous courthouses and medical boards, a laborious undertaking that would easily take days, would a consumer be able to learn that:
Schwartz has been sued seven times for malpractice during his 29-year career. He recently lost two cases at trial and settled one case before trial for $800,000. The other four cases were withdrawn for various reasons.
Last year a jury in U.S. District Court in Alexandria awarded a West Virginia airplane mechanic $3.97 million because his penis had to be amputated after failed experimental surgery performed at Alexandria Hospital--an operation for which Schwartz had no malpractice insurance. The award was automatically reduced to $1 million, the maximum recoverable under Virginia law.
* Schwartz declared bankruptcy shortly after that verdict, swearing in court documents that his current total monthly income was $8,650. Two years earlier in an application for a mortgage on a second home which is part of the bankruptcy file, the doctor listed his gross monthly income as $45,833 and included among his $3.1 million in assets a house valued at more than $1 million with a swimming pool on Chain Bridge Road in McLean, across the street from the luxurious home of Sen. Charles S. Robb (D-Va.) and near the palatial mansion owned by Saudi Arabian Ambassador Prince Bandar.
* He was evicted from his Capitol Hill medical office in 1998 for nonpayment of about $52,000 in rent that he disputed owing to the landlord.
* In 1994, the D.C. Board of Medicine fined him $5,000 and reprimanded him for "willfully" allowing a physician's assistant whom he knew to be unlicensed in the District--and whose Maryland license was later suspended--to practice medicine and dispense drugs in his Capitol Hill office without supervision.
The saga of David T. Schwartz provides a rare and unusually detailed look at the failures of the current system of medical oversight and patient protection. It also highlights the problem of medical errors, which, according to a recent influential report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), are responsible for the deaths of as many as 98,000 Americans annually and the serious and permanent injury of many more.
The Schwartz case also raises questions about the quality of information on which patients are forced to depend when they pick a doctor whom they have been led to believe has been carefully screened by their health plan and by hospitals that control whether physicians can practice. And it raises questions about the way doctors are disciplined by state medical boards, a process enveloped in secrecy that critics charge harms patients while allowing bad doctors to operate with impunity.
Some of Schwartz's patients learned the details of his past too late to do much about it, although his history of problems was well-known to hospitals, state medical boards and other groups charged with protecting the public. Inova Alexandria Hospital, which is considering whether to revoke Schwartz's privileges which were suspended eight months ago, first disciplined him 15 years ago, records show.
"We would never, ever have gone to him had we known what we found out later," said Betty Jo Brownlee, whose husband, William S. Brownlee, was awarded $1.85 million by an Alexandria Circuit Court jury in 1995 for devastating urinary injuries following prostate cancer surgery performed by Schwartz at Arlington Hospital. More than a year before Brownlee's surgery, Arlington Hospital officials, concerned about his competence after the death of a patient following a routine operation, had allowed him to keep his privileges but required him to operate under supervision for one year.
But the Brownlees, who were referred to Schwartz by their internist, had no way of knowing that Schwartz's privileges had once been curtailed--or that he was a convicted felon. "I'm very angry at the medical establishment for doing nothing and letting this man continue, considering what they knew," Betty Jo Brownlee added.
Several months ago Rep. Thomas J. Bliley Jr. (R-Va.), chairman of the House Commerce Committee, advocated opening the National Practitioner Data Bank to the public, a move that predictably enraged the American Medical Association (AMA). Long a foe of the databank, the AMA has repeatedly insisted that it remain off-limits to consumers because the public would misinterpret information in doctors' files.
"The problem with the system is that you can still find out more about your toaster oven than you can about your doctor," said Benjamin W. Glass III, a Northern Virginia plaintiff's malpractice attorney who represented the West Virginia airplane mechanic. "Patients need more access to information about their physician's history than they currently have."
"The current system is designed to protect the doctor while the exposure of the patient is forgotten," agreed Arthur Levin, executive director of the Center for Medical Consumers in New York and a member of the Institute of Medicine panel. "There seems to be an overriding concept that this country has a tremendous investment and should undertake every opportunity to salvage a physician. Where is the public interest in that?"
Consider the information about Schwartz in the provider directory and on the Web site that members of Aetna, the nation's largest health plan, routinely use to pick a doctor: It is largely inaccurate and lists three hospitals--Inova Fairfax, Inova Alexandria and the Washington Hospital Center--that have terminated Schwartz's privileges. In the case of Fairfax Hospital, the revocation occurred 18 years ago, in 1982. Schwartz does have full privileges at another Inova hospital, Fair Oaks, as well as Northern Virginia Community Hospital in Arlington, which is owned by Vencor, a for-profit chain that recently declared bankruptcy.
Aetna's regional medical director, Bernard Slosberg, said that the company's credentialing process, which reviews doctors' records at least every two years, is "almost as good as the FBI."
Slosberg said Aetna queries the National Practitioner Data Bank every two years, calls hospitals at which a doctor practices to verify that his or her privileges are in good standing and receives regular reports from malpractice carriers and other sources about payments and disciplinary actions. In addition, doctors are required to report all disciplinary actions taken by a hospital as well as malpractice payments to Aetna.
"Our folks know what's going on in the community," Slosberg said. "It would be very difficult for a [substandard] practitioner to get by."
But an Aetna spokesman said the company could not explain why Fairfax is included on the list of hospitals at which Schwartz practices and declined to answer any questions about Schwartz. "I don't know why it says that," said spokesman Walt Cherniak, who added that Schwartz was most recently recredentialed by Aetna in March 1999.
Schwartz said he, too, is baffled and did not tell Aetna he practiced at Fairfax.
Last week, after The Washington Post asked questions about Schwartz's affiliation, Aetna notified the urologist by letter that it was dropping him from its panel. Schwartz said Aetna's medical director told him the termination was the result of his failure to report the suspension by Alexandria Hospital, an action Schwartz said he did not report because it was not final. Schwartz said he has not decided whether to appeal Aetna's termination.
An Inova official declined to discuss the status of Schwartz's privileges at any of its hospitals, citing a Virginia law that guarantees the confidentiality of internal hospital disciplinary actions against physicians. "The medical staff at Inova Fair Oaks are aware of the situation and are taking steps to address the problem," said spokeswoman Lisa Wolfington.
A spokeswoman at Northern Virginia Community Hospital declined to answer any questions except to confirm that Schwartz has had privileges there since 1988.
In three long telephone interviews supplemented by an 11-page fax approved by his attorney, Schwartz offered his often philosophical perspective on the difficulties he has encountered during his 29-year career.
He said he believes that the malpractice cases against him and his loss of privileges at half a dozen hospitals are not his fault. "I'm convinced that juries and hospital boards do what they want," he said.
"Juries are nuts, they're emotional," he added. As for hospitals, "if they want to give you privileges, they'll give you privileges. If they want to refuse them, they will. I do know there have been some very good people who've applied for privileges and been denied" them.
Schwartz added that "the Virginia Board of Medicine has been informed of every change in status of hospital privileges and all malpractice verdicts and has investigated each instance. . . . There has been no determination made that there has been any violation of statute or need to change the status of my license."
Officials at the medical board declined to comment on any current or former investigations. They said that the last action involving Schwartz occurred in 1988, when his unrestricted license was fully restored after his tax conviction.
To Barbara Neuman, executive director of Administrators in Medicine, a consortium of medical board directors which is helping states create Web sites that provide consumers with physician profiles, cases involving a doctor's competence are the toughest but the most important. Unlike those involving drug, alcohol or sexual abuse, competency cases depend on the testimony of other doctors and turn on judgment calls.
"All the pieces of the process have to work," said Neuman, who has headed the medical boards in Massachusetts and Vermont. "Competency cases are the most difficult cases to prosecute because the doctor usually has the best legal counsel money can buy and the malpractice insurer sends their best litigators in and it's hard to get experts to agree to testify against a colleague. There's so much we have to blast through to make a case, because these cases don't settle out" with a doctor agreeing to surrender his license.
But too often, all the pieces don't work.
Hospitals are notoriously reluctant to censure physicians, fearful of an expensive and time-consuming lawsuit and of incurring the wrath of the rest of the medical staff. In the 10-year history of the federal databank, about 70 percent of the nation's hospitals have never reported taking a single disciplinary action against a doctor, a number far lower than the American Hospital Association had projected.
Managed care plans, which in most cases have been immune to lawsuits by patients injured by physicians, have had little incentive to weed out bad doctors, patients' rights advocates contend.
And state medical boards, chronically underfunded and frequently rendered virtually toothless by legislators sympathetic to doctors and dependent on their generous campaign contributions, discipline few physicians; last year about 2,700 serious actions were taken against 770,320 doctors, according to Public Citizen Health Research Group, a Washington-based patient advocacy group.
When state boards do act, the process often takes years and is conducted in secret; many doctors continue to practice in the interim without patients ever knowing. Plea bargaining is common. It is routine for a doctor seeking to hold onto his license to agree to accept supervised probation for a period of time or to stop performing certain procedures. But, as Levin notes "nobody ever checks" and this information is unlikely to reach the public.
And doctors, who are vociferously critical of malpractice lawyers and litigious patients, typically mount aggressive and well-funded legal defenses in the face of any action--by a professional society, hospital or state board--that threatens their autonomy. Their colleagues, meanwhile, maintain what one physician expert in medical errors has called "a white wall of silence," rarely reporting even egregious misconduct by a colleague.
Nor is the legal system much of a deterrent to bad medicine. A Harvard study of malpractice found that acts of negligence are eight to 10 times more common than malpractice suits and that about half of the cases that do make it to court result in a payment.
In instances where doctors agree to settle a malpractice case before or during trial, patients are often required as a condition of settlement to sign agreements that bar them from revealing the size of the payment and, in some cases, prohibit their attorney from contacting the state medical board or any other disciplinary entity.
A lawyer representing Schwartz's insurance company required a 25-year-old patient who lost a kidney after kidney stone treatment at Inova Fair Oaks Hospital to sign such a settlement agreement in 1998 in return for an $800,000 payment before trial.
Schwartz began practicing in the Washington area in 1971, when he obtained medical licenses in the District, Maryland and Virginia; he already had licenses in New York and New Jersey. He first came to public attention in 1977 when he announced plans to establish a telephone service providing after-hours medical advice and prescriptions to patients he had never seen. The sole requirement was that users have a major credit card. His proposal was sharply criticized by leaders of the District and Virginia medical societies, who said they worried about the possibility of harming patients who had not been examined. Schwartz said the service, which he called "ahead of its time," was killed by negative publicity.
Five years later Schwartz, who then shuttled among four medical offices--three in suburban Virginia and another on Capitol Hill--was charged by federal prosecutors in Alexandria with evading more than $150,000 in personal and corporate income taxes for three years in the mid-1970s and of failing to report taxable income of more than $459,000 earned by a corporation he controlled. In 1977, prosecutors charged, Schwartz reported a taxable personal income of $14,000, not the $125,000 prosecutors said he should have reported.
Under the terms of an agreement with prosecutors, he pleaded guilty to one count of tax evasion and spent 87 days at a federal correctional facility in Allenwood, Pa. His Virginia medical license was automatically revoked, as were his licenses in New York and New Jersey; Schwartz's license in the District was unaffected by his felony conviction and he was allowed to keep his Maryland license.
When he got out of Allenwood, Schwartz practiced at the now-defunct Capitol Hill Hospital and at George Washington University Hospital. His Virginia license was provisionally restored in 1983 and fully reinstated in 1988 after he completed probation and repaid the federal government more than $500,000.
While at Allenwood, Schwartz was stripped of his privileges at Potomac Hospital in Woodbridge, for reasons unrelated to his tax fraud conviction. The hospital audited Schwartz's charts and accused him of failing to have preoperative tests such as EKGs or X-rays read by or performed under the supervision of appropriate specialists, such as cardiologists or radiologists. Because of Potomac's revocation, Fairfax and Mount Vernon hospitals also revoked Schwartz's privileges.
Schwartz said his problems at Potomac were not the result of negligence on his part, but stemmed from a business dispute that resulted in several lawsuits. "They were after my neck for competitive reasons," he said.
Shortly after his Virginia license was restored, Schwartz began having trouble at other hospitals. In November 1984 Alexandria Hospital suspended his admitting privileges for one year, citing his failure to tell officials there the real reason his privileges at Potomac had been revoked, his failure to list on an application all hospitals where he had privileges and his falsification of the date on a sterilization consent form.
Eighteen months later, in January 1986, Alexandria Hospital again barred Schwartz from admitting patients for five months because he had no malpractice insurance. Virginia law does not require doctors to carry malpractice coverage, but hospitals generally require such insurance for doctors to whom they grant admitting privileges.
Schwartz said he has lacked coverage at times in the past because of disputes with insurance companies. He said he is currently insured by a carrier he declined to name.
In the early 1990s Arlington Hospital's chief of urology, William Dougherty, sought to terminate Schwartz's privileges on the grounds of incompetence. Arlington's credentialing committee opted for a lesser sanction and instead required that Schwartz operate under supervision for one year. Schwartz said the reason for Dougherty's concern was the death of a patient from a massive hemorrhage after a transurethral resection of the prostate, a routine operation to treat an enlarged gland. "It is rare, but occasionally these rare things happen," said Schwartz. He said he did nothing wrong and that the case did not result in a malpractice claim.
In 1993 Bill Brownlee, then a 63-year-old self-employed commercial artist who lives in Oakton, was referred to Schwartz by his internist for treatment of newly diagnosed prostate cancer. At the time Schwartz was mired in problems at another hospital, something the Brownlees never knew until their attorney Brien Roche filed a malpractice suit on their behalf.
Brownlee, whose cancer was diagnosed after a test at Johns Hopkins where he is enrolled in a long-term study of the aging process, said he considered having prostate surgery at Hopkins, which is internationally renowned for the procedure; he opted for a local surgeon because he didn't want to wait several months to get on the schedule at Hopkins.
"When you get the word that you have cancer, well, I just wanted it out," he recalled. Several friends from their church had also recommended Schwartz, his wife added.
"We talked to him and he was very pleasant and he'd gone to Harvard and he seemed very well trained and he said he'd done 60 or 70 prostatectomies and never had any problems," said Betty Jo Brownlee, who is retired from her job as a legal assistant at the Interior Department. "We asked a lot of questions and we thought we were being thorough."
On Oct. 20, 1993, Brownlee underwent cancer surgery, which was uneventful. He and his wife were told several days later that a pathology report showed the cancer had not spread outside the prostate, which meant that no further treatment was required.
But three weeks later, in the middle of the night, Brownlee's catheter came out, a potential medical emergency because urine cannot drain. Betty Jo Brownlee called Schwartz; he told her to call a visiting nurse who had been checking on her husband. The nurse attempted to reinsert the catheter. When that ultimately failed, Brownlee returned to Arlington Hospital by ambulance.
Schwartz showed up in the emergency room several hours later, according to testimony at the trial. Brownlee testified that for one hour Schwartz tried to thrust long metal instruments of various sizes called VanBuren sounds, which Brownlee said resembled barbecue skewers, up his penis and into his urethra in a futile effort to reinsert a catheter.
"It felt like he was killing me . . . and I was in such terrible pain I was screaming," Brownlee testified, adding that he repeatedly begged for anesthesia but was given none until the procedure was over. "And I yelled and said 'You're killing me.' And blood was going everywhere . . . on the wall that was right next to me."
Testimony at the trial demonstrated that the procedure not only failed to permit catheterization, but that Schwartz punched holes in Brownlee's bladder, damaging his urinary tract so completely that reconstructive surgery would later prove impossible. Schwartz said he did not use anesthesia because it is not routine in such cases and because Brownlee was an anesthesia risk as a result of his weight and underlying medical conditions.
"There are hundreds of thousands of patients who have had it done without anesthesia," Schwartz said. "You shouldn't have to use anesthesia to replace a catheter."
For the next two months Brownlee was unable to urinate normally. He repeatedly shuttled in and out of Arlington Hospital's emergency room, becoming progressively sicker as Schwartz performed additional procedures. By early January 1994 Brownlee was in critical condition in the intensive care unit. Urine was leaking into his abdominal cavity and he was at risk of sepsis, an overwhelming and potentially fatal bacterial infection.
Fearing her husband would die, Betty Jo Brownlee appealed to Dougherty, the chief of urology, who agreed to take over the case, relieving Schwartz. The following year at the malpractice trial, Dougherty testified against Schwartz, as did another Arlington Hospital urologist who had clashed with Schwartz over Brownlee's treatment.
Brownlee, who said he has undergone more than eight surgeries on his urinary tract since the prostate cancer procedure, now urinates through a bag attached to his stomach. He is permanently and totally incontinent; his bladder had to be removed several years ago. The bag that collects his urine often leaks, he said, and "it's very embarrassing--you look down and all of a sudden your pants and your shirt are soaking wet, like a baby."
"He's ruined me for life sexually and as far as anything else goes," added Brownlee, who was forced to retire early, as was his wife. Their dreams of spending their retirement traveling abroad have been dashed; they can never be too far from a urologist, and Brownlee is especially prone to infections that could quickly become lethal. Both say they have seen a psychiatrist for treatment of depression and are too tired to spend much time with their three young grandchildren.
"I have to live with this for the rest of my life," said Brownlee, seated in his immaculate living room surrounded by art collected during previous travels. "I can't begin to tell you how demoralizing it is and how angry I am that someone did this to me." The irony, he added, is that his cancer has not recurred: Surgery was a cure.
Schwartz said that Brownlee's problem, an unusual and unfortunate complication of prostate cancer surgery, was the result of his "tremendous obesity"--Brownlee weighed close to 300 pounds, according to Schwartz--and of the actions by the visiting nurse when she attempted to reinsert the catheter.
Schwartz said that he was in no way negligent and attributed the $1.85 million verdict against him and a corporation of which he was the sole shareholder to the jury's failure to understand the evidence presented by his experts and the fact that they "felt sorry" for Brownlee.
But Bill Brownlee's prostatectomy is not the only operation of its kind that raised a red flag among other surgeons.
In 1994, officials at Alexandria Hospital, alarmed that Schwartz's patients seemed to lose an inordinate amount of blood during prostate cancer surgery, disciplined Schwartz a third time, ordering that he undergo retraining and perform prostatectomies only under supervision, Schwartz said.
Schwartz said he went to Baltimore to watch operations performed by Patrick C. Walsh, Johns Hopkins's world-famous urologist-in-chief, who pioneered modern prostate cancer surgery. In October 1995, Alexandria Hospital reappointed Schwartz, but noted that his clinical competence and professional judgment "need improvement."
During the fourth supervised prostatectomy, Schwartz said, his patient began hemorrhaging and subsequently suffered temporary kidney failure. Alexandria's chief of urology immediately gave Schwartz an ultimatum. "He said, 'You're not doing these at all anymore and if you don't agree, we'll do a big investigation of you,' " Schwartz recalled. He said he decided to relinquish his prostatectomy privileges in January 1996 because he knew he could still perform the procedure at Washington Hospital Center, where he had obtained privileges in 1991 after initially being denied them.
On January 30, 1996, Schwartz relinquished his prostatectomy privileges at Alexandria, an action that was reported to the databank, according to court documents. At the same time Arlington Hospital refused to renew Schwartz's privileges, informing the databank that he had "failed to prove clinical competence," Schwartz said.
Based on Arlington's action, Washington Hospital Center threatened to yank his privileges and the D.C. Medical Board launched an investigation. But the D.C. board acceded to Schwartz's lawyer's request to indefinitely continue a disciplinary hearing, according to the board's lawyer. Last October, after months of negotiations, Schwartz resigned his privileges at Washington Hospital Center. He said he did so because he no longer practiced in the District and didn't need privileges there.
In 1998 Schwartz was evicted from his office in the Capitol Hill Medical Center for failing to pay $52,000 in overdue rent. Schwartz said he did not pay rent for about a year because of a dispute with the landlord, which subsequently resulted in several lawsuits that have not been resolved.
In 1995 Stanley F. Williams, a 46-year-old aviation mechanic with homes in West Virginia and Fairfax County, was referred to Schwartz for treatment of impotence caused by Peyronie's disease, a condition of unknown origin in middle-aged men in which the fibrous tissue in the penis thickens, causing the organ to bend and making intercourse painful if not impossible.
In September 1995 Schwartz operated on Williams at Alexandria Hospital, implanting a penile prosthesis and surgically removing damaged tissue. Schwartz also performed a lengthening procedure on Williams's penis, an operation he had never before attempted but had read about in a medical journal.
Schwartz said that Williams agreed to the lengthening procedure; Williams said it was never discussed. There is no mention of it on the surgical consent form Williams signed. The operation, which took about 6 1/2 hours, was videotaped at Schwartz's request. Schwartz said he videotaped the surgery "because I wanted to."
Williams, who was supposed to be discharged the same day, spent eight days in the hospital.
Within weeks of surgery, the prosthesis became infected and began protruding from Williams's penis. Schwartz readmitted him, removed it and implanted another prosthesis. Within weeks that prosthesis became so badly infected that it cut off the blood supply to Williams's penis, essentially killing the tip. Williams was unable to urinate without a catheter and scarring from the implant surgeries had shortened his penis by two inches.
Desperate, Williams sought treatment in West Virginia. Urologist Kyle F. Fort sent him to specialists at the University of Virginia and the Cleveland Clinic; both told him there was nothing they could do. He was then referred to Steven M. Schlossberg, a Norfolk urologist known for reconstructive genital surgery who, coincidentally, had seen Bill Brownlee several years earlier.
Schlossberg, along with a plastic surgeon, amputated Williams's penis and constructed a new organ, using a flap of skin from the patient's forearm which was wrapped around a prosthetic device.
Williams, who had no history of psychiatric problems, became suicidally depressed after the failed surgery by Schwartz and was briefly hospitalized. In a brief interview recently, he said that "nothing works right." His lawyer said he has no feeling in his penis.
Williams sued Schwartz for battery in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. By then he had learned that Schwartz lacked malpractice insurance and was personally liable for any award because he had not bought a policy covering past claims, coverage doctors routinely purchase.
Schwartz said in an interview that he didn't buy a policy because "they wanted between $38,000 and $50,000" for it.
During the two-day trial in May 1999, two urologists testified on Williams's behalf. Thomas R. Lanyi of the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond called him a "urological cripple," adding that Schwartz's post-operative infection rate was "exceedingly high" and calling the surgery "a major violation of the standard of care."
Fort, the West Virginia urologist who treated Williams and had watched the surgery videotape, called Schwartz's technique "unbelievably appalling" in its roughness and testified that Schwartz had made numerous errors in the operating room.
But urologist Myron I. Murdock of Greenbelt, an old friend and colleague of Schwartz, testified he had done nothing wrong. And Schwartz testified that he had discussed the lengthening procedure with Williams, warning him of potential complications and that Williams consented.
"If you do unusual surgery, you're going to run the risk" of a lawsuit, Schwartz said recently. Williams "had two rough years but it didn't cost him a penny. He's got a good result now and he told me everything is fine. He's not a urological cripple--that's crap."
The eight-member jury deliberated about 4 1/2 hours before awarding Williams $3.97 million. That amount was automatically cut to $1 million, the maximum recoverable under Virginia law in a malpractice case.
Around the time of the trial, Alexandria court records show, Schwartz began transferring assets, including two medical office condos near Alexandria Hospital he has owned for years, from his name into his wife's name. Shortly after the verdict he filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11. That meant that his creditors, led by Williams, would have to wait for payment |
