ttp://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i10/10a06001.htm
From the issue dated October 28, 2005
The Egg Man and Other Anti-Fraud Activists
An eclectic group of self-appointed watchdogs keeps an eye on overseas
medical schools
By xxxxx
Dean Hughson spent his career as a salesman and consultant to egg
companies. But researching medical schools for his son in 2003 set him
on a new career track.
Mr. Hughson was startled by the number of apparently low-quality
overseas medical schools that were marketing themselves to students.
He was even more shocked that some states "have no laws to protect
consumers from some of the 'two cadavers and a professor over a pizza
parlor'-type medical school," he wrote in an e-mail message.
So he developed a (Web site) devoted to exposing what he considers
fraudulent medical schools around the world. And he is writing a book
on the subject.
Thousands of Americans who plan to practice medicine in the United
States are studying overseas in institutions that lack government
oversight, even, in most cases, by the nations in which they are
located. Mr. Hughson's dismaying discovery added him to the tiny group
of individuals trying to monitor those institutions.
He has visited schools in the Caribbean, Britain, and Mexico, often
posing as a parent seeking to enroll his child. He has learned of
schools that don't exist, or whose main requirement for admission is a
bank check, he reports. For his criticism, he says, he has received
threatening phone calls from students.
Meanwhile, xxxxxxx, an assistant clinical professor of medicine
at Boston University and a practicing doctor, has denounced cases of
medical fraud for 15 years. Although he does not attempt to monitor
overseas medical schools, he is an outspoken critic of shoddy medical
practices through his organization, the National Council Against
Health Fraud.
He is particularly critical of teaching over the Internet, which some
Caribbean medical schools rely on heavily. The practice, he says,
produces doctors unable to deal with real-life problems.
"I think that if the public" in the United States "knew that you had a
free-for-all going on in the Caribbean," says Dr. Bxxxxx, " ...
there'd be outrage."
'Terrorist Organization'
The American Association of International Medical Graduates may have
been the most ambitious of all such watchdog efforts. From 2000 until
this summer, the association was run by a doctor named Thomas Moore,
who died in August. Mr. Hughson then took over the group's Web site.
While the association does not have many members, he says, it did
arrange for evaluators to visit Caribbean medical schools. Their
reports, often harshly critical, were posted on the Web site.
In its final set of evaluations, made before the site went offline in
September, the association failed half of the 24 schools it evaluated.
One school with a failing grade, the University of Health Sciences
Antigua, responded by describing the association as a "terrorist
organization" on the school's Web site.
Representatives of several state medical boards speak highly of Mr.
Hughson and say he is a good resource.
"He's a tireless researcher," says xxxxxxxx, executive director
of the Texas Medical Board. "He's filling a void."
While he is content to keep doing this work, Mr. Hughson urges U.S.
government agencies to send their own inspectors to evaluate the
overseas institutions.
"You shouldn't have to have an egg man helping lead the battle to
clean up shaky offshore medical schools," he says.
