ProPublica – Cheryl Lee Carr clutched her phone, willing it to ring. The last time she’d answered it, a hospital surgeon told her he didn’t know if he could save her mother’s leg, let alone her life.
But he would try to stop the hemorrhaging from her major leg artery, punctured by a doctor at a nearby clinic.
Carr had spent that morning in February 2020 at the Lehigh Valley Vascular Institute in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, waiting as her 82-year-old mother underwent what was supposed to be a simple procedure to clear plaque from her arteries.
More than four hours in, Carr knew something was wrong. She pushed past the front desk to find her dazed mother in a recovery room, two clinic employees holding a bloody compress over a leg that had turned deep purple.
“Where’s the doctor?” Carr recalled yelling. “Call 911 right now!”
“McGuckin is still seeing patients today, still adding to the nearly $50 million he has earned in the past decade in federal insurance reimbursements.”
Now, as Carr braced for news about her mother’s fate, her thoughts turned to the clinic’s doctor who, she recalled, was nowhere to be seen as his patient bled. Carr pulled up a search engine and typed in his name: James McGuckin.
A deluge of results poured in.
What the hell? she seethed as she scrolled. Why is he still practicing?
For more than a decade, the Pennsylvania doctor and his national empire of vascular clinics had been scrutinized by agencies at every level — state medical boards, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Justice — for conducting experimental or unnecessary procedures on patients, putting their lives and limbs at risk.
He’d been disciplined by medical boards in over a dozen states, lost privileges in multiple hospitals and settled federal allegations of fraud, admitting that his company had performed procedures without any documented need.
Pennsylvania had tried to shut his clinics down …
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