Startling examples abound of doctors being sued for seriously harming patients while in physician health programs nationwide. These programs undoubtedly include success stories as well. Dr. Stanley Mark Dratler may be one despite a long history of transgressions. It’s difficult to say. Dratler was among the earliest participants in Florida’s PRN program when he had his license suspended for three years in 1986 — for what an investigation described as “exercising influence within a patient-physician relationship for purposes of engaging a patient in sexual activity.”
He faced 27 counts of sexual misconduct with six patients at his practice in Dade City, Fla., including documented abuse of females as young as 14. Dratler’s illicit behavior also surfaced in a federal report issued that same year by the inspector general’s office of the Health and Human Services Department. It referenced his case, where Dratler became St. Louis Medical Center’s chief of gynecology in July 1985 because the Missouri Board of Medicine was unaware of 32 sexual abuse complaints filed against him in St. Louis as well as Dade City. By the end of 1985, Drartler reportedly volunteered to no longer practice in Missouri. The state indicated that it was seeking an injunction to ban him from practicing there again.
These types of incidents led to the creation of a National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB). Established by Congress in 1986, it is described as “a workforce tool that prevents practitioners from moving state to state without disclosure or discovery of previous damaging performance.” The web-based repository of reports contains information on “medical malpractice payments and certain adverse actions related to health care practitioners, providers, and suppliers.”
Even if the NPDB existed when Dratler was accused of offenses at Brooklyn’s Maimonides Medical Center in 1977, it likely wouldn’t have captured the details. He was named as a defendant as the plaintiff unsuccessfully attempted to prosecute the hospital and its administrators. The complaint reminds me of my friend Ben who faced serious questions when he became an intern. Dratler was described as “a resident physician in the hospital’s employ” who “wrongfully and maliciously injected (the plaintiff) with valium and proceeded to have sexual intercourse with her while she was in a drugged and helpless state.”
Dratler’s background on Florida Health’s website doesn’t include any reference to Maimonides. He lists his residency as beginning in 1978 at St. Louis University Hospital, where Dratler began an ostensibly malevolent – and pre-empted – career in obstetrics and gynecology.
Check out the next post to learn more about additional reported incidents in Dratler’s work history, as well as others that Florida medical authorities likely don’t know about. Most notably, his connection to a convicted pharmacist in Maryland who was imprisoned in 2010 for illicitly dispensing millions of Oxycodin.