Doctor’s troubles began in Tennessee, continued in Georgia

A year later, Shih signed an agreed order acknowledging that he had indeed prescribed drugs without a legitimate medical purpose. He also agreed to penalties that included a 90-day suspension of his license and a $4,000 fine.

By then, though, it hardly mattered. Shih was in Georgia.

Members of the Georgia Composite Medical Board say the board has long operated under an unwritten policy: Physicians with unresolved disciplinary issues in their home states can’t be licensed in Georgia until those matters are cleared up.

But that policy never applied to Shih, who was licensed in Georgia a year before the Tennessee charges became public.

Records reviewed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution show that the 64-year-old physician has been practicing for nearly two decades in Atlanta even though his license remains suspended in Tennessee.

And, the records show, he has held onto his license in Georgia despite at least two incidents that raised new questions about his fitness to practice medicine.

Both incidents led to sanctions from the Georgia medical board, yet neither caused Shih to lose his license.

David Swankin, the president of the Citizen Advocacy Center, a nonprofit group that scrutinizes health care regulatory agencies, said the fact that Shih was disciplined twice in Georgia after his suspension in Tennessee should have given the Georgia board pause.

“Every time one of those other two issues came up in Georgia, they could have looked at the entire record,” the Washington, D.C., attorney said. “They could have said, `My, God, how did this guy get his license?’”

Georgia board members and other officials, citing state law that requires confidentiality for investigative and licensing matters, declined to address Shih or his history.

Speaking generally, however, they said it would be rare to see a physician licensed in Georgia as long as there was a pending disciplinary matter in his or her home state.

“There may be some extenuating circumstances,” said Dr. Jean Sumner, a Wrightsville physician who formerly served on the board and is now its medical director. “But in the years I’ve been associated with the board, it has always been, `Clear up this problem if you want to come to our state.’”

Shih did not respond to phone and written interview requests from the AJC. He also declined to meet with an AJC reporter who twice visited his clinic, Prompt Medical Care in Doraville.

Shih’s profile on webmd.com says he graduated from the China Medical College in Taichung, Taiwan, in 1976 and that he speaks five languages — English, French, Chinese, Spanish and Vietnamese. His public profile on the Georgia board website shows that he also attended McGill University in Montreal and trained at hospitals in Tennessee, North Carolina and Taiwan.

In the section of the profile for “physician comments,” he wrote that his relocation from Tennessee and the expansion of his practice caused him to lose medical records. In an apparent reference to the disciplinary cases in Georgia, he also said he had experienced language and communication difficulties.

“The resettlement to North America created language, culture, legal-social and qualification barriers that I have no choice but (to) overcome,” he wrote.

The 15 patients documented by the Tennessee investigation ranged in age from 7 to 55. They were treated by Shih at clinics he operated in LaFollette and Jacksboro, Tenn., between 1985 and 1995.

According to the Tennessee board, Shih prescribed large amounts of narcotics, tranquilizers and diet pills, sometimes without diagnostic tests or attempts to determine what conditions the patients suffered from.

Although Shih ultimately signed the agreed order, he did so “to avoid the time and expense of a contested case hearing and in light of having permanently relocated his practice to the state of Georgia,” the document said.

Tennessee board records show that Shih paid his fine, but his license remains suspended. That’s because he never petitioned the board to have the suspension lifted as required by law, a spokesman for the Tennessee Department of Health said.

Georgia board records show the board was aware of the Tennessee case and in fact conducted its own investigation of Shih's practice.

According to those records, an agent from the Georgia Drugs and Narcotics agency in 1996 visited a clinic Shih then operated in Chamblee. Shih admitted he did not maintain prescription files for controlled substances he dispensed. However, when the agent visited the clinic four years later, it was determined that Shih was in compliance with dispensing regulations.

Following that inquiry, the board placed Shih on two years' probation. Under terms of the probation, he was required to pay a $1,000 fine and complete a course at Mercer University called "Appropriate Prescribing of Controlled Substances."

Yet before those conditions had been met, Shih’s practice was again being examined by the board, records show.

In 2002, the board ordered Shih to abstain from "all further surgical procedures" after it found that he had no records to reflect his treatment of a patient who continued to suffer pain and swelling in his scrotum following two hernia operations.

The patient couldn’t immediately be treated at a hospital emergency room because of the lack of records, according to documents included with a lawsuit filed by the patient seeking to take Shih’s deposition several months after the surgeries.

“Please respond immediately as (the patient’s) health is being jeopardized by your failure to provide these records,” the patient’s attorney, Mike Carroll, wrote in a letter faxed to Shih while the patient was awaiting emergency treatment.

The suit, which contended that Shih’s testimony was needed to determine whether any negligence had occurred, was dismissed a year later. Carroll said his client agreed to drop the suit after receiving an undisclosed settlement from Shih.

Four years after the board's ruling in the hernia case, a peer reviewer assigned by the board determined that Shih had departed from accepted medical standards in his treatment of a 20-year-old woman.

When the woman visited Shih complaining of pain in her left ear as well as “whole body” pain, the physician conducted a pelvic exam, took a patient history and ordered a urinalysis, board records show. He diagnosed the woman with “severe pelvic inflammatory disease” and prescribed a series of drugs, the records show.

The woman subsequently visited another physician and was diagnosed with mild skin irritation in her ear, the records show. Other tests, including a urinalysis and a pap smear, were normal, according to the records.

The physician who reviewed the case for the board wrote that Shih “had no sufficient physical findings or symptoms to justify conducting a pelvic exam on a patient presenting with complaints of ear pain.”

Shih disputed the peer reviewer’s conclusion and denied violating any regulations, according to the records. However, he agreed to pay a $2,500 fine and complete 30 hours of continuing education in the area of treatment of obstetrics and gynecological diseases.

Records show the board never took action against Shih for a bizarre case in which he was charged with murder in 1997 and acquitted by a Fulton County jury three years later.

The charge stemmed from the shooting death of a Chinese businessman who was visiting Atlanta in 1996. Prosecutors alleged that Shih shot and killed the man at a Roswell residence after treating him earlier in the evening. But Shih argued that the man committed suicide during a Chinese ritual involving a gun and knife.

The board had the power to suspend Shih’s license pending the resolution of the case, but there’s no record of such an order in the physician’s public disciplinary file.