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Board charges Cary doctor
Patient sued in '96 over forced sex
Sarah Avery, Staff Writer
Nearly 10 years after the incident and seven years after a lawsuit was resolved, a Cary doctor has been charged by the N.C. Medical Board with forcing sex on a patient.
The medical board charged Dr. Michael David Stadiem with unprofessional conduct last week and posted the action on its Web page Monday.
But the case had been known to the board for years and was the subject of a lawsuit filed in Wake Superior Court in 1996 and dismissed in 1998. A settlement was struck, but all parties signed an agreement not to disclose the details or discuss the case.
No criminal charges over the incident were filed against Stadiem.
Calls to lawyers on both sides were not returned Monday. Stadiem said he could not comment about the allegations but said he was taken aback by the medical board's action: "It just surprised me that it came about now," he said.
Thomas Mansfield, legal director for the medical board, a 12-member panel that licenses and polices doctors who practice in North Carolina, said the case took too long for the board to prosecute. He apologized for the long period between the start of the board's investigation and the filing of charges.
In that time, Stadiem, 54, worked with a spotless public record as a family practitioner. The medical board lists his current practice at Cary Primary Care.
"The case is woefully old," Mansfield said. "I want it known that I'm sorry it's taken so long to prosecute the case. It certainly is outside the norm."
The filing is the latest in a series of board actions that have drawn controversy. In April, a Sampson County woman charged that the board gave too many second chances to drug-addicted doctors who, she said, failed to diagnose and treat her cancer aggressively.
And earlier this year, a group of patients in Wilmington questioned why a weight-loss surgeon was allowed to keep his license despite a record of alcoholism. Those patients have sued the doctor for performing a surgery different from the one to which they had consented.
Mansfield did not say what took the board so long to charge Stadiem but said the board did not know about the allegations until almost a year after the lawsuit was settled. A spokesman for the board, Dale Breaden, said the case was then "put aside inadvertently."
According to accounts in the medical board's charges and the lawsuit filed in court, the case against Stadiem stems from an incident in his office one Saturday in late 1995 or early 1996 (the dates, as well as some other details, differ in the two legal records).
The victim alleged that she began seeing Stadiem in 1993 after she had injured her back and had surgery for a herniated disc. Her back remained painful, and Stadiem prescribed the narcotic methadone.
Intimate details
She contended in court records that she became dependent on the methadone and upon Stadiem to prescribe it. At the same time, Stadiem began telling her about his marital problems and other intimate details of his life, she said. He often called her at home, and she referred to him as Michael, not Dr. Stadiem, the suit said.
It was within that context, her lawsuit said, that she agreed to meet him at his office on that Saturday. He told her he'd give her an injection to ease the pain in her shoulder, which she injured during a fall. But he also told her to bring an X-rated movie, the suit said.
When she got to the office, he suggested injecting her back in addition to the shoulder with the pain killer, and she protested. He told her to expose her back to him, and when she did, she said he struck her at the location of her herniated disc and then "sexually assaulted (her) against her will," the lawsuit states.
She filed her lawsuit in December 1996 and amended it 18 months later to add a claim that Stadiem's medical care was negligent because he had prescribed excessive doses of methadone and didn't monitor her for side effects.
In a Dec. 5, 1997, letter, the victim's attorney suggested that the case could be settled for $500,000.
"By his own admission, he confided in her about his marital and personal problems," attorney Elizabeth Kuniholm wrote in the letter seeking the settlement.
Even without the allegation of rape, a breach of the proper boundary between patients and doctors can be prosecuted by the medical board. Mansfield said doctors can neither treat patients with whom they have a pre-existing relationship nor forge social relationships with people they meet as patients.
Crossing the boundary
"It doesn't have to be a sexual relationship" for the proper physician-patient boundary to be crossed, he said. Those situations give physicians an imbalance of power that, when used to their personal advantage, can hurt patients.
The board took 17 actions against doctors last year for such "boundary violations," and it took 19 actions in 2003. Most of the board's actions are against doctors who have run into licensing trouble in other states. Drug and alcohol problems are the second-most common infraction, followed by incompetence.
Stadiem could settle the charges with the medical board through a consent order or fight the charges in a hearing. Mansfield said the board has earmarked the case to be heard by an administrative law judge but has not set a date.
He said the board sometimes refers cases to an administrative law judge when hearings are expected to be protracted or when they don't require the board's medical expertise. Stadiem may continue to practice medicine pending the outcome of his case.
© 2005 by The News & Observer Pub. Co. Reprinted with permission of The News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina. Reproduction does not imply endorsement.