Dangerous Medicine: How North Carolina’s Medical Board Lets Addicts, Felons, and Extremists Treat Patients

The Breakdown

🩺 Unfit Doctors Still Practicing: NC is allowing doctors with felony records, addictions, and sexual misconduct to keep treating patients, sometimes after only a slap on the wrist.

📉 Audit Exposes Systemic Failures: A 2023 state audit revealed hidden investigations, delayed action, and failure to enforce discipline, even ignoring sanctions from other states.

⚠️ Lawmakers Must Step In: Without reforms, dangerous doctors will continue slipping through the cracks. Patients across North Carolina remain at serious risk.

Why It Matters

🛑 Your doctor could have a criminal past or drug addiction, and no one is required to tell you.
With no public warnings or proper discipline, patients are left in the dark about who’s treating them.

⚠️ When the system fails, it’s your health and safety on the line.
Delayed action means dangerous doctors stay in practice, risking misdiagnosis, mistreatment, or worse.

If you think your doctor in North Carolina has been thoroughly checked out and held to a high moral standard—you might want to think again.

Right now, in our state, doctors with criminal records, drug addictions, and even histories of sexual misconduct are being allowed to treat patients. These aren’t rumors or old stories—these are recent cases.

And the people responsible for letting it happen sit on the North Carolina Medical Board (NCMB), a group that’s supposed to protect you and your family.

Who’s in Charge—and Why It Matters

The NC Medical Board has 13 members: eight are picked by the governor, three by state lawmakers, and two other doctors are elected. Their job is to keep bad actors out of our healthcare system.

But instead of protecting the public, they’re protecting their own.

In 2023, the State Auditor released a report showing how broken the system is.

🔍 What the 2023 State Audit Revealed

1. Investigations Hidden from Auditors
The Board blocked state auditors from reviewing more than 95% of their investigations. That means no one could verify whether real problems were being addressed or just buried.

2. Slow to Act
Even when a doctor was under investigation, the Board took too long to act. The law says investigations should be done in six months. Not one of the cases auditors reviewed met that standard.

3. No Follow-Up on Punishment
Some doctors who were supposed to be disciplined kept treating patients and even billing Medicaid. The Board didn’t track whether punishments were being followed.

4. Ignoring Warnings from Other States
Doctors who lost their licenses in other states for serious misconduct were allowed to set up shop in North Carolina. The Board didn’t take action even when other states had already punished these doctors.

Real Cases, Real People at Risk

Let’s break this down with a few examples from rulings from the past 60 days:

• A doctor failed to tell a patient about years of abnormal test results until the patient was near death. The Board gave him a simple “letter of concern”—not even a punishment.

• One doctor had his license revoked in 2014 for prescription fraud, was convicted of felony drug trafficking in 2017, diagnosed with opioid addiction, and was back to work in 2021. All forgiven because he said he got treatment.

• Another doctor was caught huffing nitrous oxide (laughing gas), crashed his car while high, got a DWI, and kept practicing after two months of rehab.

• Convicted felon Dr. Farad Riaz lost his license in over a dozen states for a massive fraud scheme, lied to another state’s board about his criminal record, and still treats patients in North Carolina via telehealth today. Multiple states have banned him, but North Carolina has not.

Even worse, the State Auditor’s report from 2023 uncovered more:

• A surgeon arrested for indecent exposure in June 2021 kept practicing for seven months while his charges were pending. The Board never acted.

• A doctor accused of sexually assaulting a patient was allowed to treat people for five months after his arrest. No public warning. No restrictions.

• Another doctor, convicted of assaulting a woman in 2021, had a past reprimand from 2016. The Board waited five more months before taking action.

These aren’t one-off mistakes. They’re patterns. And they’re still happening.

What Needs to Happen

The 2023 audit made clear recommendations:

• Change state law so the Auditor can see everything.

• Fix the investigation process so doctors can’t keep practicing while under review.

• Enforce punishments and honor out-of-state sanctions.

But we need more:

• Ban reinstating doctors with felony records.

• Disqualify doctors who lie, abuse drugs, or spew hate online.

• Require background checks to include cross-state disciplinary history and active monitoring of sanctions in other jurisdictions.

• Establish an independent oversight panel, separate from the Medical Board, to review serious allegations and licensing reinstatements.

The North Carolina Medical Board has become a revolving door for dangerous doctors. Until the General Assembly steps in, people across this state will keep walking into exam rooms without knowing the real history of who’s treating them.

That’s not just a failure. That’s betrayal.