Patients in the dark

First in a two-part series

The patient was partially sedated as she headed for a dental appointment that December morning in 2003. Groggy and horizontal in the back seat of her sister's car, she was just blocks from the dentist's office when her cell phone rang.

"Your procedure's been canceled," her husband told her. "Your doctor had an accident."

Meanwhile, a few blocks farther south, a little drama was unfolding. Earlier that morning, according to a police report, Murray police had received a call from a worried employee: Her boss's car was in the parking lot, but nobody answered when the employee banged on the office door.

When police pried the door open they found the dentist, Kathleen McCombs, sitting on the floor, an oxygen mask over her face. McCombs, who had come highly recommended and was on an insurance list of preferred providers, had been up all night inhaling nitrous oxide, according to police.

It would take another day, and some luck, for the patient to find out the barest of details. It would take several months, and filing a government records request, to get the police report. And only later did she learn, from public records purchased from the Utah Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing, that the dentist's nitrous abuse dated back to 1999, when she entered the state's confidential drug "diversion" program, which she'd successfully completed just seven months before.

Why, the patient wondered, was she only finding this out now?

Meanwhile, two days after the dentist's "accident," the patient got a phone call. "Hi," said a cheerful staffer. "I'm calling to see if we can reschedule your surgery." By then, the patient, Deseret Morning News reporter Lois Collins, had found another dentist to do the work. But she wondered about the dentist's other patients who weren't privy to the information she now had.

That question spawned others. How much do any of us know about the doctors who diagnose us, put us under, cut us open, care for us? How much can we find out? Are we, as patients, protected from doctors who could harm us?

Most Utah doctors do not do drugs or sexually molest their patients. Most are not incompetent. Many, in fact, are exceptional.

But to wade through even a few of the reams of disciplinary reports on file at the state's Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing (DOPL) is to be reminded that doctors can be disappointingly human; that they are tempted by the painkillers they prescribe and sometimes sloppy about the care they provide.