Tugging the Forelocks Response letter, written by the Provost to the letter I wrote to the Chancellor

Here I post just a passage from the first page of a two page response letter from the Provost, to the letter I had written to the Chancellor at UNC Chapel Hill. I just focus on the one of the totality of the dismissive (nothing to see hear) intentions of the letter, which is the passage in the letter response that I found especially callous, dismissive, unethical, and obfuscating of patient safety and injury considerations. Where he writes that because the two faculty members are no longer employed by UNC, UNC will not pursue the situation with them any further. The 2 faculty members, Paul Jacques, MD, who operated drunk for 2 decades, and Al Parker, MD, the mass-murder-in-waiting, the latter who was the initiating cause for my reporting, as it was a critical immediate concern. That an institution could consider they had no obligation to victims of essentially aggravated assault by an intoxicated doctor, nor a troubled physician, who engaged in other misconducts, which I will bring out later, but is touched on in my Crossing the Rubicon letter to Folt. It was this gross abrogation of responsibility that actually took me to the next level of consulting an outside attorney. The sole instruction I gave to that attorney is to write a letter modelled after the letter I sent to Chancellor Folt, but the letter is now to escalate to the next higher level of academic seniority, send that letter to the Board of Trustees. That letter never sent, which I discuss later.

Also absurd on its face the comment higher in the letter about Dr Einarsson doing an investigation, and a meeting between Einarsson, Mauro and myself. There was no such meeting, and ofcourse on the surface that would be preposterous as future writings will reveal.. Also I never saw the evaluation of my complaints that was constructed by Einarsson, but only fleetingly for 20 seconds in my Faculty Hearing Committee meeting. Enough time to see the report was essentially bogus.

So if one was to assume there was any reasonable assertion by the Provost that there was nothing to be done, then the case that victims of Reginald Archibald, MD, the physician on Faculty in Rockefeller University, NYC, who sexually molested young boys, or of Richard Strauss, MD, the faculty member at Ohio State University, who sexually touched male university students; there was no obligation for the Institutions to investigate or provide restitution to victims. These were medical crimes committed in a time frame much earlier than the eventual reckoning in these cases, by decades. There is recently released a documentary on Ohio State and Richard Strauss, These were much greater intervals between crimes and accomplished restitution, that I insist UNC Chapel Hill must do for the victims of Paul Jacques MD, a number permanently injured, and I suspect a number killed because they had been operated on by a drunk.. And worse senior administration knew he was drunk and operating on patients. Injuries that cause permanent physical injury or death are perhaps a million times worse than the crimes of Drs Archibald or Strauss - this is a league apart. To paraphrase a passage in a comedy special by Neil Brennan: a female friend of his told him in a discussion on rape and murder, that rape was as bad as murder, his response 'both are very bad, but I know a number of women who have been raped and have psychologically recovered, but I don't know of anyone who has recovered from being murdered'.

It does amaze me that many people including news organizations appear unable to understand or stratify the differences between different levels of assault. Being killed or permanently injured, which happens with interventional radiology procedures if done improperly, are incomparably vastly worse than all the famous reported cases of physician misconduct with patients, involving some level of inappropriate sexual touching.

Here is an excerpt from that letter highlighting the famous trigger sentence. My next posting on this subject in coming days will be the Poison Pen letter of dismissal.

Richard Semelka, MD

Semelka4.pdf

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