Just when you thought it was safe to return to the doctor, Dr. Death is back.
The first two episodes of the podcast’s second season debuted Tuesday. Season Two will tell a deeply disturbing new story. Its central character: former Michigan oncologist Dr. Farid Fata. Fata, who’s now serving 45 years in a federal prison, was sentenced in 2015 for running a fraudulent multimillion-dollar Medicare and insurance scheme. As part of it, he prescribed chemotherapy to patients who did not have cancer.
“He’s definitely an outlier,” said Laura Beil, the health and science journalist who hosts the podcast. “But it does kind of expose the problem when you have a system that’s based on doctors billing for things that they do."
Episodes come out on Tuesdays. The new season will include five.
Season One of Dr. Death earned millions of downloads upon its 2018 release by the podcast publisher Wondery. Reported and narrated by Beil, a former Dallas Morning News reporter, it told the story of former North Texas neurosurgeon Christopher Duntsch, who was sentenced to life in prison for seriously injuring one of his patients at Dallas Medical Center. Duntsch had been accused of maiming and killing several patients in a spree of botched surgeries at area hospitals.
Beil says she’s still unsure what motivated Duntsch. But greed, she says, is what drove Fata.
“In this country we’ve chosen to have our health care system as a capitalistic enterprise,” Beil said. “But there’s a downside if your health care is a business. You’re going to be incentivized to operate it like a business and make money.”
The fifth and final episode of the new season will turn away from Fata to revisit a Duntsch horror story listeners might remember. It’s that of Jerry Summers, Duntsch’s childhood friend who was left paralyzed after the doctor performed spinal surgery on him. Summers declined to speak with Beil for Season One but contacted her earlier this year.
“I was very moved by Jerry,” Beil said. “He has a lot of complicated feelings because this was his best friend who did this and it changed his life profoundly.”
Beil said settling on a new subject proved challenging.
“There were a lot of doctors, unfortunately, to choose from, But this case exposes larger holes in the health care system in a different way. And there are some common themes. It underscores how difficult it is for us as patients to research our doctors. The tools we have to find out about our doctors are about the same tools that we have to find a good restaurant. That’s unfortunate.”
At least a few producers believe audiences still haven’t gotten enough of Duntsch’s story, as Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater are set to star in a series based on Dr. Death’s first season for the NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock. A release date hasn’t been set.
