In the past two decades, doctors have been prescribing pain pills and sedatives to patients at an astonishing rate. The Feds have been cracking down on many of these doctors turned pill pushers.
Recently, a Manhattan physician got busted for prescribing thousands of narcotics to people who did not even have a clinical exam. The pills were prescribed without any clinical indication for large sums of money.
The doctor in question is Dr. Martin Tesher of Manhattan. He was a good old fashioned family doctor who even made house calls for his patients. Even though he knew that many patients were addicted to pain pills, this did not prevent him from prescribing high doses of narcotics.
In the past 5 years alone Dr. Tesher wrote more than 14,000 prescriptions for oxycodone and his complete loss of moral compass finally landed him in Court. For the past few years, the DEA has been tracking all prescriptions of narcotics in the USA and Dr. Tesher’s name came up as a prolific prescriber of these pills. The prescriptions were written out for nearly 2.2 million oxycodone pills worth an estimated $20 million.
The country has been in a grip of an opiate epidemic with a few people dying almost every week. In 2016, in the five boroughs of NYC there were 1,075 deaths, up by 43% from the previous year. From 2000-2015, the number of deaths from opiates alone have tripled and all over the country there has been a demand for the government to stop doctors over-prescribing these medications. In 2015, it was estimated that nearly 2 million Americans were addicted to opiates, while another 95 million used some type of prescription pain medication regularly.
The number of prescriptions Dr. Tesher was writing eventually caught the eye of the federal authorities. On his website Dr. Tesher declares himself as a pain management expert but prosecutors said that the 81 year old physician has never had any type of pain management training.
His downfall came when he supplied three confidential informants with opiates but he did not examine them nor did he even ask about their addiction. Dr. Tesher rarely kept any medical records and simply ignored all signs of addiction. He is set to be sentenced soon. He will have to give up all his illegally earned money plus spend some time in jail. It is unlikely he will ever practice medicine again.
