Drug past, discipline didn"t stop doctor

Metropolitan Metropolitan
The Dallas Morning News
Sunday, July 1, 2001

Drug past, discipline didn"t stop doctor

State board took years to revoke license.

By Doug J. Swanson, Staff Writer

As his crippled patients clamor for payback, Dr. Bruce Hinkley finds himself at the scandalous end of the profession line, hoping for just one more chance.

The files of the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners bulge with accounts of doctors who let drugs demolish their careers. Few of them have walked such a twisted path, dodged so many disasters and finally fallen so hard as Dr. Hinkley of Dallas.

“I’ve lost everything I ever had,” he said.

That includes his medical license, which the state revoked late last year after more than a decade of suspensions, probations and restrictions.

Now Dr. Hinkley has challenged the revocation in court. With a favorable ruling, he could absorb what is normally considered a mortal career blow – testing positive for cocaine – can come barreling back.

It wouldn’t be the first time for him. Or even the second.

His is one of the longest-running disciplinary cases on the books of the medical board, the enforcement agency that allowed him to keep practicing – and performing surgery – despite mounting evidence of cocaine use.

That’s what happens, Dr. Hinkley’s adversaries say, when a smooth operator meets weak regulators.

“He’s smarter than hell,” said Al Ellis, a Dallas lawyer who has filed two malpractice suits against him. “He knows the system, how to play it, how to fight it, how to stay in it. This is one of the most gross cases I’ve every seen in my life.”

Once a local star of spinal surgery, Dr. Hinkley portrays himself as an innocent victim. “I think there may even be a conspiracy involved,” he said.

At least 20 former patients, contending he maimed them in botched operations, have no sympathy for him.

“He’s either one of the best con men on the face of the Earth,” said Cheryl Glover, 43, “or the most stupid genius I’ve ever seen.”

Mrs. Glover spoke from her wheelchair, with her hand lightly resting on a morphine pump. She had no need for either device, she said, before her surgery by Dr. Hinkley.

The doctor’s life has changed as well. At 55, he has gone from making millions of dollars a year to asking friends for grocery money.

Stocky and tray, he still wears a surgeon’s scrub suit to work. But his current job, at an occupational rehab clinic on the fourth floor of the downtown YMCA, replicates little else from his former life.

He lays blame for his recent destruction at the feet of bad laboratory technicians, greedy lawyers, venal insurance companies and a mystery woman cooking crack cocaine in his own kitchen.

“This is a path God has chosen for me,” he said.

Providential or not, Dr. Hinkley’s tortuous route can be tracked through voluminous court files and state records. The thousands of pages give numerous personal details: He’s Baptist with a genius-level IQ. He struggles with his weight and once had liposuction. He traces his ambition to boyhood zoo trips, when his parents threatened, if he wasn’t’ good, to throw him to the wolves.

The records also describe a one-thriving career falling into ruin. They raise questions about the hospital that kept Dr. Hinkley on staff. And they reveal the plodding state regulatory system that finally did him in.

Dr. Hinkley graduated from the Baylor College of Medicine in 1972. “He was an extremely brilliant person,” said Shaye Evans, his first wife was divorced from him in 1975. “He loved his medical career.”

By 1980 he had remarried and established in a practice in orthopedic surgery in McAlester, Oklahoma. Two years later, on a trip to Houston, he got his first taste of cocaine.

Five years of occasional use developed into an addiction.

“He was known to us as one of the local “Cocaine Cowboys,’” a former agent for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics wrote in a memo. “We attempted to secure evidence which could be used in criminal prosecution but were never able to do so.

After that the staff at McAlester Regional Health Center had its fill of his missed appointments and operating-room tantrums. Dr. Hinkley was ordered to submit to urine testing. A test in September 1988 showed positive for cocaine use.

Days later, Oklahoma board records say, Dr. Hinkley “was found with a gun crawling in pasture near his home with his wife.” He told authorities “the Mafia or Nazis were after him over a drug deal in Dallas.”

Snorting cocaine

“I was flat in the gutter,” he recalled years afterward. “Despicable, disgusting, space brain.” He was snorting, he said, as much as half an ounce of cocaine a day.

With his bank accounts drained and his marriage in trouble, he checked himself into a detox clinic Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. There, Dr. Hinkley acknowledged his addiction and joined a 12-step program.

The Oklahoma medical board put him on five years’ probation in 1989, the Texas board for 10 years. Among the conditions: random drug tests.

He practiced in the Dallas area but with unsatisfactory results. Thoughts of returning to Oklahoma were dashed in 1992, when his license there lapsed and his application for reinstatement was refused.

“His is one of the worst records I have ever seen,” the board’s compliance director wrote.

But if Oklahoma didn"t want him, Texas did.

Garland Community Hospital recruited Dr. Hinkley to join its staff in 1992. Although officials knew of his prior cocaine problem, they placed him on no special restrictions.

The surgeon’s arrival helped put this obscure, 113-bed hospital on the map. Patients with bad backs arrived from other cities, some even from out of state, seeking Dr. Hinkley’s healing touch.

He became quickly immensely successful with a controversial procedure known as 360-degree lumbar fusion, in which metal screws are sued to stabilize injured vertebrae. Arduous and complex, the procedure requires incisions on the patient’s front and back.

“This surgery,” Dr. Hinkley said in one deposition, “is bloodier than a hog killing.”

It’s often a treatment of last resort.

“He had a reputation for fixing the unfixable people,” Dallas chiropractor Gregory Davidovich said at a hearing last year.

Business was more than good. Court papers filed by Garland Community shows that Dr. Hinkley performed about 125 surgeries a year, with an average hospital bill per patient of $48,000. That means the hospital billed $36 million over the course of six years from his work.

In 1995 and 1996, his patients generated more income for the hospital than those of any other physician. His personal gross revenue of 1996 was $2.4 million, court documents show.

Dr. Hinkley said he told each patient before surgery of his previous drug difficulties.

“He looked me in the eye,” said Mrs. Glover, “I said ‘Have you had any problems since then,’ and he said no.”

In promotional materials, the doctor portrayed himself as the “Surgeon of the People” and the _____ of insurance companies, many of which balked at paying for the high-priced procedures.

Chiropractor Davidovich testified that he thought so much of Dr. Hinkley that he was prepared to refer his ailing mother to him. Insurance carriers, meanwhile, worked the grapevine.

“I had more than one nurse [from an insurance company] come in here, and tell me that I might as well be sending my patients to a butcher at a grocery store,” Dr. Davidovich said at a licensing hearing.

Rumors swirled when Dr. Hinkley appeared at the hospital with his hair bleached blond; some suspected an attempt to foil the state mandated drug tests he was required to undergo.

“That’s a stupid thing to say,” Dr. Hinkley said. His explanation: ‘I lost a Super Bowl bet with my hairdresser.’”

Other behavior seemed odd. “I was a little concerned when he showed up for a hair specimen collection, and he had no hair anywhere,” Virginia Torres, a compliance officer with the medical board, testified at a board hearing.

Dr. Hinkley said his full-body shave was merely part of buffing himself for “some of those 50-and-older physique contests.”

Reported drug buy

In an affidavit filed last year, his personal trainer, Michael Scarcella, swore that he saw Dr. Hinkley use cocaine in 1998. Mr. Scarcella also said that he had observed Dr. Hinkley purchasing cocaine “on several occasions: and that the doctor asked to travel to Mexico to make a large drug buy.

He added that Dr. Hinkley told him he used an undisclosed “cleansing substance” that allowed him to pass drug tests. “I can recall Dr. Bruce Hinkley telling me on at least one occasion that beating his drug tests was a game to him,” the affidavit said.

Contacted last month, Mr. Scarcella declined to be interviewed. Dr. Hinkley, maintaining that he has not used cocaine since 1988, denied Mr. Scarcella’s allegations.

Nicholas Milam, a lawyer no living in the Chicago area, said he saw Dr. Hinkley snorting cocaine in a hospital restroom in 1995 or ’96. “He was right there by the sink,” said Mr. Milam, who was at the hospital to talk to his client.

“That’s just plain stupid,” Dr. Hinkley responded, “I would never use at the hospital in plain sight.” He added that “back in the old days” – meaning his time in Oklahoma – he would pursue his habit in the privacy of a toilet stall.

Mr. Milam represented a doctor sued by Garland Community over a contract dispute. He said conversations with his client and his own experience convinced him that hospital officials were aware of Dr. Hinkley’s cocaine use.

“Certainly they knew he was abusing drugs,” Mr. Milam said. “I’m sure they saw him.”

Numerous lawsuits now pending make similar claims. “They would have to have been deaf, dumb and blind not have seen the signs this man was using narcotics,” said Mesquite lawyer Ted Lyon, who has filed five suits against Dr. Hinkley and the hospital.

Tina Armstrong, 37, of Longview, said four surgeries by Dr. Hinkley left her in constant pain and unable to control her bladder. She believes he was under the influence of cocaine when he operated; she blames her condition on, among others, Garland Community.

“They had no concern for the patient,” she said. “All they were thinking about was the money he was generating for them.”

Hospital officials refused a request for an interview but issued a statement: “When Garland Community Hospital became aware of Dr. Hinkley’s failed drug test, his hospital privileges were suspended immediately.”

In early 1998, three separate urine tests over a span of three weeks showed evidence of cocaine use. The state medical board barred Dr. Hinkley fro treating patients, pending a hearing.

His explanation was unlike any the board normally encountered: the “dirty” tests, all three of them from a private lab, were faulty, Dr. Hinkley said.

On the same days that the three positive samples were taken, Dr. Hinkley said, he had his own tests conducted at a separate lab. Those tests, he said, were negative.

Also, he had the positive samples analyzed, “And it turns out,” he told the board, “The DNA in those three urine tests were not my DNA.”

Additionally, he questioned the chain of custody of the positive samples. In a later interview, he suggested an attempt to frame him. “Was this an accident, or was I set up? I don’t know. It sure is scary.”

Though this strategy may have been a first for the Texas medical board, it was a repeat performance of sorts for Dr. Hinkley. Ten years earlier, in Oklahoma, he tried to challenge the results of positive urine tests.

Oklahoma officials didn"t buy it then. The Texas board, however, decided to pull its punch. In 1998 Dr. Hinkley’s probation was extended five years, and he was allowed to work as a surgeon again.

No board representative would agree to talk about the Hinkley case.

“The board’s mission is to protect the public, said a written statement from board president Lee S. Anderson. “Each disciplinary case is conducted on its own merits, following the law and the right to due process.”

Attorney Lyon, a former state legislator, said the board’s behavior in this instance was unfortunately typical.

“They are more concerned about the impaired physicians than the paralyzed patients,” he said. “They’re much too influenced by their desire to protect physicians, and they have been for years.”

Garland Community Hospital welcomed Dr. Hinkley back, lent him $150,000 to restart his practice and renewed his credentials.

Dr. Stephen Ozanne said he operated with Dr. Hinkley, and he observed no problems. “I was with him on some surgeries at a time when he was supposedly testing positive, and he seemed absolutely fine,” Dr. Ozanne said.

But on March 30, 1999, he tested positive again. One day later, Dr. Hinkley did a 360-degree lumbar fusion on patient Bobbye Wolfe.

“He was allowed to perform an extremely complex spinal surgery on my client within 24 hours of testing positive for cocaine,” said her attorney, Kay Van Wey. “The public has a right to be outraged.”

Ms. Wolfe, 39, a filed suit, saying she suffered pain, disfigurement and nerve damage.

On June 28, 1999, another of Dr. Hinkley’s urine tests showed positive for cocaine use.

Two weeks before that he had operated on Mrs. Glover, who lives near DeKalb in northeast Texas. She said the surgery left her with nerve damage and crippling pain.

Patient in wheelchair

Mrs. Glover once did roofing and painting work. Now, she said, she is housebound in her wheelchair using morphine for the pain.

“I believe he’s a very selfish, immoral person,” she said of Dr. Hinkley.

When called to account, Dr. Hinkley presented the state medical board with another novel explanation: “It’s clear that if [cocaine] any came into my body, it was not knowingly so,” he said.

At a licensing hearing, Arizona physician Kent Holtorf noted that Dr. Hinkley had given a clean urine sample three days before the positive test. The second test had relatively low levels of cocaine indicators. Thus, Dr. Holtorf concluded, Dr. Hinkley could not have taken enough of the drug within that brief period to feel the effects.

For his part, Dr. Hinkley mentioned an unidentified recovering addict whom he allowed to stay at his house. “It could be that they relapsed and cooked something up,” he said, referring to crack cocaine. He theorized that his skin might have absorbed the residue.

The state medical board, following the recommendations of an administrative law judge, revoked Dr. Hinkley’s license last October. Eleven years had passed since he was first put on probation.

“The board acted with all due haste,” said Rick Wootton, a former board attorney who handled Dr. Hinkley’s case. “Unfortunately, the system allows for a lot of delays in getting this done.”

In a recent deposition, Dr. Hinkley told how he coped with the resulting loss of status and income: “Moaned a lot, talked to friends a lot, caught up on my reading, sold off my possessions,” including his University Park home and his Ferrari coupe.

“I saw him not long after it all came crashing down, and he was quite despondent,” said fellow surgeon Ozanne. “I was able to go over and give him something to buy groceries.”

Dr. Hinkley said he now works as an insurance clerk for the occupational rehab clinic. “The greatest part of it is,” he said, “I’ve learned I don’t need all this stuff.”

At least 14 suits against him by former patients are pending or have been recently settled, and attorneys are preparing another six for filing. Garland Community Hospital, which wants its $150,000 loan back, also sued him, alleging fraud.

Dr. Hinkley said the suits are without merit; he blamed lawyers for the volume.

“There’s an overly aggressive plaintiff’s bar that thinks they’re on a quest in God’s name,” he said in a recent deposition. “There’s a lot of greed involved, and I think they have found a man that they think is weak and down and they’re going to take advantage of it.”

He has his own legal action pending, the suit to win his license back. His constitutional rights were violated, Dr. Hinkley contends, because the medical board did not prove that he intentionally used cocaine.

Dr. Hinkley would not allow his photograph to be taken, and he consented to only a brief interview for this story. He hinted repealed .