A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

A physician from the San Francisco Bay community of Los Gatos was sentenced last week to a year in jail for a false diagnosis of prostate cancer in an 87-year-old patient and then subjecting him to an unnecessary brachytherapy treatment.

According to a San Francisco Chronicle report, Ali Moayed, MD, pleaded guilty Jan. 25 to charges of felony elder abuse and felony insurance fraud. The urologist also was accused of falsifying pathology reports for two other patients and recommending that they also undergo brachytherapy treatments, but the deception was uncovered before those men had the procedure, according to the Chronicle.

All three cases occurred in 2005.

Deputy District Attorney Bill Butler said all three men were older men who spoke English as a second language.

The newspaper said it was unclear why Moayed engaged in the deception, as the roughly $5,000 received in insure payments for the treatment “was paltry compared with his income and property holdings.”

Prosecutors indicated that the physician told the patient who received the treatment that he had cancer just weeks after his son had died of another form of cancer. “He had just buried the son, and the doctor was aware of that,” Butler said. “That’s the thing that’s really appalling about this.”

In addition to other fines and what will be three months of jail time followed by serving the rest of his sentence under electronic surveillance, Moayed paid $75,000 to the man who underwent the procedure and $12,500 to each of the other two men. He also lost his license and, will never practice medicine again, according to Butler.