COME CLOSER · NEW EPISODE RECAP

There's a specific kind of trust you only give a handful of people in your life. Your doctor's on that list. We usually lie down on the table and let them do what they said they'd do, because of the sacred trust between a patient and a healer.

This week's episode is about a man who harmed almost 40 people and none of them were strangers in a dark alley. They walked in on their own two feet, booked the appointment themselves.

His name was Christopher Duntsch, but you might know him as Dr. Death. If you missed the episode, here's the recap. If you already watched it, here's your excuse to sit with it a little longer.

Christopher Duntsch was born in Montana and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. He was a private school kid, the oldest of four, a college football player. His father was a physical therapist and a Christian missionary. His mother was a school teacher.

He enrolled in an MD and a PhD program at the University of Tennessee in Memphis, and along the way took part in a biotech startup called DiscGenics, where he was later let go over money issues. By this point, he was almost $500,000 in debt.

The typical benchmark for competence in surgery is performing about 1,000 surgeries during your MD program. He did 100. Howver, he didn't bother to mention that. His resume twelve pages, single-spaced, and falsely claimed he'd graduated magna cum laude from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital with a doctorate in microbiology - a program St. Jude didn't even offer when he supposedly attended.

In July 2011, he started the Minimally Invasive Spine Institute in Dallas and received surgical privileges at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano. The hospital welcomed him with a $600,000 advance — a single neurosurgeon brings a hospital about $2.5 million a year. A colleague who'd assisted more than 2,000 spine surgeries over 16 years called him the worst surgeon he'd ever seen. Nurses noticed him in the same unwashed, ripped scrubs three days in a row and wondered if he was under the influence. He performed multiple procedures that resulted in lawsuits and permanent physical damage to three patients.

Then, in 2012, his best friend — his most trusted confidant — let him perform neck surgery on him. He woke up a quadriplegic. Duntsch had damaged his vertebral artery. His friend spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. In April 2012, Baylor quietly let Duntsch resign, and sent his next hospital a clean reference saying he'd voluntarily resigned with no issues with his performance.

In July 2012, Dallas Medical Center gave Duntsch provisional privileges to perform five surgeries. His first was uneventful. On his second, he damaged the patient's vertebral artery — she suffered significant blood loss, had a stroke, and lay dying while he moved on to his third surgery, where he amputated a nerve root and misplaced screws into muscles, ligaments, and tendons. That second patient was Floella Brown. She was moved to another hospital but never regained consciousness, and her family withdrew life support just a few days later. Duntsch lasted less than a week before administrators pulled his privileges. Methodist Hospital denied him privileges next and reported the denial.

At a Frisco, Texas surgery center starting in December 2012, he severed a patient's vocal cords and an artery during a cervical fusion. In another surgery, he punctured a patient's artery again, cut their vocal cords, pierced a hole in their esophagus, and left a sponge inside them — the patient spent four days in the ICU and survived with permanent nerve damage. Two neurosurgeons filed complaints. In 2013, they were invited to a celebratory dinner to meet the hospital's brand-new neurosurgeon: Duntsch.

Complaints piled up through 2012 and 2013. Texas Medical Board members reportedly found it hard to believe anyone could be that incompetent. It took until June 2013 for the board to find the pattern of patient injury required to justify suspending his license — 33 injured patients apparently wasn't pattern enough on its own. The board revoked his license on December 6, 2013. By then, 33 people had been maimed and 2 were dead. Duntsch had a drug problem. In one of his journals, he wrote that he was God.

Full episode is available now. Find out what really caused all of this, when it happened before, and where I sentenced him to one of the 9 rings of hell.

Come Closer. It’s darker than you think.

xx Rae