Doctor Sentenced to Death for Ordering Unnecessary Scan

Andrew J. Vickers, PhD, DPhil 

Dr. Philip Bird, a family practitioner in Oxford, Mississippi, has been sentenced to death by lethal injection for ordering an MRI on a patient with uncomplicated low back pain. Bird's sentence is believed to be the first under the state's new "get tough" 3-strikes law. The presiding judge, the Honorable Marsha Williams, told the court that although she sympathized with the defendant, the law left her no discretion. Bird twice previously had been found guilty of ordering unnecessary scans: a CT for a woman reporting pregnancy-related tension headache and a bone scan for a patient with localized prostate cancer. 

Prosecuting attorney Luke O'Neill said that justice had been served. "It gives me no pleasure to send a man to death row," said O'Neill, "but Dr. Bird had a choice and knew the consequences of that choice." State senator Grant Douglas, Jr., a former hospital administrator who introduced the "3 strikes" law, said that he hoped the case would "serve as warning to the medical community. We've tried everything to bring down the rate of unnecessary scans. We've done studies, presented evidence, written guidelines -- hell, I've even gone down on my hands and knees and begged -- but nothing doing. Scratch your ear in front of a doctor and next thing you know you'll be shoved into a CT machine. Really, they left us no choice but to threaten them with death." 

Dr. Josephine Watkins, a medical economist, said that she doubted the ruling would affect medical practice. "The economic and malpractice incentives to scan are so extreme that even the possibility of years in a windowless cell followed by a botched execution is unlikely to be a deterrent." Bird himself was unrepentant. In a statement released by his attorney, he said that Douglas "needed his head examined" and that either CT or functional MRI should be considered.