The patient Duntsch operated on continues to walk with a cane and lives with chronic pain.Īnd that was just one case from Baylor-Plano. Randall Kirby (played by Christian Slater in the Peacock series), said he watched Duntsch botch a relatively simple procedure by refusing to use a scalpel to remove a disk, instead using a different instrument that ended up causing more damage. There, other surgeons quickly realized their new colleague was not just arrogant about his abilities but an actual danger to his patients as the casualties began adding up. This position also granted him operating privileges at Baylor Regional Medical Center (Baylor-Plano). Following training, Duntsch settled in the Dallas area in 2011, joining the Minimally Invasive Spine Institute in Plano as a practicing physician. On paper, Duntsch was a star pick for any hospital system once he completed his residency, thanks to years of research and study of the use of stem cells and several strong recommendations from his prior supervisors. “They don’t want to go participate in any extraneous activities, and he was totally fine going to work.” “After you’ve spent a night using cocaine, most people become paranoid and want to stay in the house,” the woman said in the deposition, according to D Magazine. One woman remembered Duntsch taking LSD and cocaine throughout one night, before leaving the next morning for his hospital shift. But depositions from Duntsch’s peers who knew him around that time period, between 20, point to cracks in the facade. Things seemed to be moving along smoothly. (He was later let go from the company over money issues). He was even part of a group that founded the biopharmaceutical company Discgenics-which focuses on developing regenerative cell-based therapies to help with pain-and brought on two of his mentors in surgery as investors. And at first, Duntsch appeared to have what it took: He enrolled in an M.D./Ph.D program at the University of Tennessee at Memphis College of Medicine and put in dozens of hours in cancer and stem cell research. He decided he’d be a neurosurgeon and was not going to let anything, including lack of skill or training, stop him in his quest.

This attitude and outlook stuck with Duntsch as he set out to achieve something beyond football and landed on surgery. Death sums up the confusion many felt at watching Duntsch work: “It was like he knew what he was supposed to do … and he did the exact opposite.” One conversation in Peacock’s first episode of Dr. Death, which jumps across time in each episode to show what the doctor was like as a young man, friend and medical student, and then later as a surgeon, a partner and a father. The question of how Duntsch was able to operate with impunity for so long-when surrounded by many people who tried to raise the alarm and failed-drives Dr. Such significant injuries should have been “never events”-something that should never occur in an operating room, a surgeon told D Magazine, which covers the Dallas-Fort Worth area, in a 2016 piece that inspired the eventual Dr. One patient, a childhood friend of Duntsch’s, went in for a spinal operation with someone he trusted and woke up a quadriplegic after the doctor damaged his vertebral artery. Two patients died, one from significant blood loss after the operation and the other from a stroke caused by a cut vertebral artery. Some people woke up paralyzed others emerged from anesthesia to permanent pain from nerve damage. How does a doctor get away with something like this? Of the 37 patients Duntsch operated on in Dallas over about two years, 33 were hurt or harmed in the process.

Dead guy cant escape hospital