On a recent night I developed this thought: I wondered what had become of the physician who helped bring me into this world in 1955. I don’t recall if I ever queried my parents on whatever happened to, well we will call her, Dr. Doctor. My parents have been dead for almost 25 years, so I couldn’t call to ask them. I don’t know if any of my four brothers knew what happened to Dr. Doctor. So having the Internets at the tip of my fingers, I decided to do a search.
I found on a genealogical site an article about Dr. Doctor. It seems that just a mere 13 days after I was born, she moved from our area to what I believe was her hometown in Northeast Texas. With her leaving so soon on the heels of my birth I found myself wondering if she knew something I didn’t know?
Then I decided to take a real long shot and do a search on the physician database of the Texas Medical Board to see if Dr. Doctor was still practicing or was even alive.
If she is alive today Dr. Doctor would be 75 years old. I did find that she had been practicing up to 1995 but did not renew her license. I then found that a year or so before she had ceased practicing she had been given a reprimand by the medical board due to “allegations of practicing ‘corporated’ practice of medicine.” I didn’t really understand that term so I e-mailed someone at the medical board to see if they could tell me what it meant. I haven’t heard from anyone there to this very day.
Finally, I did some searching and found that the “corporated” practice of medicine is known by most everyone else “corporate” practice. I then found that the corporate practice of medicine is prohibited in Texas, at least it was apparently prohibited more than 10 years ago when my birth doctor got her hand slapped. I found this citation on the subject:
See: Tex. Rev. Civ. Stat. Ann. art. 4495b, ยงยง3.07(f), 3.08(12), and 3.08(15) (Vernon Supp. 1996), providing that it is unlawful for a physician to allow another to use his license or to aid or abet the practice of medicine by any unlicensed person.
Well, I don’t have enough of my precious spare time to look into these citations to find out if corporate practice is still outlawed and I doubt if I would understand them if I found them I guess I’ll just ask my doctor next week when I go in for my monthly meds at the VA. I don’t know if he will be able to answer my questions because he was educated in India, but it’s worth a shot.