A Surgeon's Response to Boston Globe Spotlight Article

Response to the Boston Globe article, ‘I’ve lost so much hope in health care’: How the slow-moving Mass. board of medicine is failing patients.

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Published on December 19, 2025

Here are the facts: 

Physicians are humans; they will make mistakes. 

People will get hurt because of those mistakes. 

In our current practice climate and culture in the U.S., physicians will not feel safe to own up to those mistakes. 

In that vein, I ask, what result do we want to create? Do we want an even greater mass exodus of physicians from the profession, because they’re afraid of being human? Or is there another way that we can approach this, with compassion for both the patient affected and the physician who made the mistake? Can we evaluate errors objectively, learn from them, and perhaps prevent them from happening again? We can all agree that people whose actions are nefarious should be held to task and face real consequences. What we want to avoid is the toll of complaints and litigation on physicians who don’t deserve it. I believe that there’s a world where that can happen.

Frustration and disappointment with the state board of physicians is far from new to me as a board-certified ENT. The process of physician review and handling of complaints can be opaque and mysterious, and I will share my own experience to help demystify the process. 

This is what happened to me: in one year, I received two unrelated board complaints stemming from my practice. The first was a gentleman who I had not seen in over one year, who walked into clinic seeking a Prilosec refill. My office staff offered him a clinic visit ten days in the future, and after he left, he formally filed a complaint against me for delay in care and inability to get his Prilosec for ten days. 

The second person who filed a complaint about me, I had never met. She was still able to go to the online state medical board form and fill out a complaint about me, for not operating on her sister-in-law’s tonsils in a timely-enough fashion. Her sister-in-law had recurrent strep tonsillitis, meeting soft criteria for elective bilateral tonsillectomy. 

Both of these complaints took over one year to move through the system. They weren’t urgent. They were ultimately dismissed without any board action. But they took their toll– patient complaints to the board weigh heavily on the physician, and that one year felt like five. The first thoughts that went through my mind when I received these complaints were,

“Maybe I am a bad doctor,” and

“I could lose everything.”

The significant impacts on physician mental health cannot be overstated when they’re one of the good ones, and receive a complaint filed against them. A retrospective analysis from 2014 for physicians from Tennessee who were referred to their state medical board for evaluation of fitness of duty over an eight year period found that 5% were known to have attempted or completed suicide (7 out of 141 physicians). (Iannelli 2014)

If we are psychologically harming physicians who aren’t the bad apples, this will only further worsen the physician shortage and mass exodus from medicine. We need to talk about this in a way where yes, point out without hyperbole and hold people to consequence, those who do bad things. But we can’t ignore the quiet majority of physicians who are just trying to do their job and take care of their patients to the best of their ability. “To the best of their ability” means, because they are human, that they will make mistakes. In our profession, when we make mistakes, someone gets hurt. In other professions, failure is necessary for growth. 

I invite us to think about, how can we fail well in this profession? Without sensationalizing it, without practicing from a place of threat and fear.