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They worked side by side with the fugitive doctor accused of performing unnecessary surgeries on hundreds of patients.
Now, for the first time, former co-workers of Dr. Atiq Durrani are breaking their silence about what they say went on inside and outside the operating room, and they all say the same thing: They knew something was wrong.
Jeff Angeline is a physical therapist who teamed up with Durrani in 2009 at Durrani’s private practice, The Center for Advanced Spine Technologies, or CAST.
“Part of you thinks back and wonders if you would have spoken up, could you have done something if you had known at the time? But at the time, I didn’t,” Angeline said.
Angeline said the goal was to help Durrani’s patients before or after surgery.
But in one year of working together and seeing more than 100 patients, Angeline said Durrani only sent him a handful of clients.
“Next thing you know, he’d say, ‘OK, well, we need to do surgery on you.’ And I’d think, ‘Why not send you to therapy? I can help you in physical therapy. This is what I do,'” Angeline said.
Angeline said he became so concerned, he finally said something to Durrani himself.
But that was the beginning of the end.
“After hours, I talked to him and said, ‘Hey, can we go and do a little physical therapy before your surgeries and just see how they do?’ And he didn’t answer me. But the next time I show up for work, there’s a Post-it note on my desk saying I’m no longer to attend rounds,” Angeline said.
Others who crossed medical paths with Durrani tell similar stories.
Among them was Dr. Nael Shanti, a spine surgeon who worked for Durrani for three years.
In a video deposition, he testified as part of the civil lawsuits filed by hundreds of former Durrani patients.
“To me, it was pretty bad. He would show up late for cases. He would not be there for the entire case. He would start another case while this case was not fully completed yet,” Shanti said.
Shanti also said Durrani would work on multiple patients at a time.
He said even though he’d do surgery on many of Durrani’s patients, Durrani would not let him be a part of the initial exam or post-surgery consultation.
“When I’d walk into the OR and at times, I’d look at the scans and I’d ask him, ‘What’s the reason for surgery?’ And he’d say, ‘Oh.’ He always had an answer. ‘Oh, she’s in miserable pain. I requested injections.’ This that and the other, ” Shanti explained.
A few months before Durrani was arrested by the Feds, Shanti quit.
So did Dr. Zeeshan Tayeb, a pain management specialist who also worked for Durrani.
Both doctors said when they were hired by Durrani to work at his private practice, and they thought they were going to become partners with him.
They both said they left feeling like they had been deceived.
In Tayeb’s video deposition obtained by WLWT, he said he saw Durrani operate on the wrong part of a patients spine, a part of the back that wasn’t injured.
“We had identified a certain area that should be worked on. Well, the individual went into surgery and went on to have a level two to three levels higher done, which was an area that was not looked at, never addressed” Tayeb said. “Very simply put, the wrong level was done.”
Tayeb said he and Shanti always wanted to try more conservative measures, such as therapy or injections, first but he said Durrani decided on the more aggressive route of surgery because it generated more money.
“Back then, every little diagnosis could translate into some extra procedure that could be done to add to the tab,” Tayeb said.
The federal indictment said Durrani derived significant profits by convincing patients to undergo medically unnecessary spinal surgeries and would bill private and public health care benefit programs for those fraudulent services.
Kimberly Kelly was never in the operating room with Durrani, but she said she worked with him several times a week as an X-ray tech at West Chester Hospital.
She said that, often times, the experience was uncomfortable and unprofessional.
“Dr. Durrani called the females a lot of derogatory names. The female staff in the operating room were called whores and putas (a Hispanic slang term for whore),” she said.
But Kelly said what concerned her the most was what she claims she heard Durrani say about his patients.
“I was in a case one day and there was a conversation going back and forth between him and the surgical assistant and the words out of Dr. Durrani’s mouth were, ‘Americans are stupid. They’ll believe anything I say,’” Kelly said.
Kelly said she reported Durrani to West Chester Hospital in 2012.
She said he was reprimanded but within weeks, the derogatory comments continued.
Kelly said there was a feeling amongst the staff that Durrani was untouchable because of the business he brought in.
According to the affidavit filed in the criminal complaint, during a three-year period between 2010-2013, Durrani’s surgeries accounted for more than $12 million in charges billed to Medicare.
For all of the people like Kelly, their job, their passion was taking care of patients.So why did it take so long for all of them to come forward?
Kelly said the answer is simple: “I mean, if you work there, you’re not going to come forward because you’re in fear of losing your job.”
Durrani gave a deposition two weeks ago from Pakistan.
He adamantly denies any wrongdoing in any of his cases and disagrees with any questions about his behavior as a surgeon.