Doctors Behaving Badly: Oregon board nixes doc's ill-advised injections, connections

CHJ Fellow

October 18, 2010

One of the reasons that state medical boards frown on doctors who start relationships with their patients is because of the power differential. The doctor is in a position of authority, like a teacher or a preacher, and is not supposed to abuse that position by using it, even in a subtle way, to coerce a patient into intimacy.

Dr. Gregory Gomez was not subtle about it.

According to Oregon Medical Board documents, while at the Sherwood Providence Medical Clinic, he was treating a patient who also worked there. He started to talk to her "in the work place with the intent of initiating a sexual encounter, to include one occasion where he approached her in the workplace, pushed her against a wall and kissed her." The two started seeing each other, the board said.

This was the summer of 2008, and it turned out to be a busy one for Gomez. He also was seeing a medical assistant who worked under his supervision at Providence. As might be expected, the dual dating "precipitated strained interpersonal relationships" in the office and "inappropriate email correspondence and erratic behavior during the summer of 2008 that eventually came to the attention of the Tualatin Police Department" and Gomez's bosses at Providence.

When confronted, Gomez denied having had a relationship with the medical assistant. Providence monitored Gomez, though, and, after a few more incidents involving the medical assistant, he was asked to resign. As is often the case when a doctor is shoved out, Providence left it up to Gomez to tell the medical board. He did not tell the medical board.

Instead, he went to work at the Oregon Male Performance Clinic in Lake Oswego. There he developed a routine of asking men a few questions and then injecting their penises with testosterone. As the board noted, Gomez's "willingness to treat male patients with testosterone based on reported symptoms alone subjected his patients to the risk of harm for treatment that was not medically indicated."

Like what?

Well, one patient, after receiving an injection, "returned to the clinic more than two hours later, complaining of discomfort and blood in his urine. The bleeding persisted for two days."

Beginning in January 2010, Gomez began to undergo a battery of tests of his medical knowledge and mental health. The board does not explain what prompted the tests, but tests like these are almost always the result of a complaint. A psychological exam found Gomez's performance "on many of the speed tests to be exceptionally fast" but also that he "had a cognitive deficit in the areas of complex non-verbal problem solving, and scored low in measures of concept formation, set shifting and perceptual reasoning, which indicate problems with flexibility of thinking and generation of multiple hypotheses."

Gomez signed a stipulated order with the board admitting to the allegations and agreeing to be disciplined. He was put on probation for 10 years ordered to pay a $2,000 fine and prevented from conducting any breast or pelvic exams on female patients 12 and older without a medically trained chaperone in the room.

All of this information is easy to find and freely available on the Oregon Medical Board's site. It's a tad confusing that the search results for Gomez show what appear to be four different Gregory Gomezes. Given that each one has the same license number, the confusion is quickly resolved. This isn't ideal, butat least this way the board documents all the cities where Gomez has worked. Some medical boards just list the doctor's most recent place of business, perhaps misleading some patients who may have seen a doctor in Medford but may not know that he has since moved.

Final question: What does the trajectory look like for a doctor who has been caught hooking up with patients and then caught performing questionable sexual enhancement procedures? If you guessed medical marijuana dispenser, you win. Gomez can be found in the June 2010 issue of Cannabis Connection (ostensibly a medical newsletter that looks more like an issue of High Times).

Jenn Harris contributed to this report.

To view this doctor, and others, on the Doctors Behaving Badly Google map, click here.

To inquire or to quibble, write askantidote [at] gmail [dot] com.

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The Doctors Behaving Badly tour thus far:

New Jersey board smears good doc with another's crimes

New Hampshire medical board keeps doc's manslaughter history hush-hush

Nebraska medical board gives love tap to doctor

Medical board gives addicted Montana doctor last chances galore

Michigan medical board keeps physician's misdeeds under cover

Doctor dinged twice by Missouri med board decries rising insurance costs

Mississippi makes public pony up for peek at doctor histories