Santa Ana doctor placed on probation for 8 years for prescribing opiates without medical reasons

Dr. Kent Lehman, a Santa Ana doctor, has been placed on probation for eight years by the California Medical Board and has been restricted in what medications he can prescribe, according to the O.C. Register.

Lehman was accused of prescribing addictive opiates without a medical reason. He also was accused of gross negligence, due to prescribing opiates without first conducting proper physical exams and inadequate record keeping as well. Lehman is no longer allowed to prescribe certain controlled substances, including narcotics.

Lehman was accused of prescribing high doses of opiates to 20 patients without first conducting proper examinations.

The Medical Board of California set up a sting in 2013, when a woman posed as a patient with ankle pain. Lehman was caught on an undercover video prescribing her Vicodin without first conducting an examination of her ankle. Then to make matters worse he noted on her chart the results of a physical examination that never happened. Then two weeks later, he prescribed even more Vicodin to the woman even though she had not taken the recommended X-rays of her ankle.

In a different case Lehman kept on prescribing OxyContin to a patient even after he had received a report that the patient in question was filling out prescriptions for narcotics from a bunch of doctors at several pharmacies.

This isn’t Lehman’s first rodeo. He was previously put on probation by the Medical Board twice – as recently as 2004. In that case Lehman was placed on probation for five years after excessively prescribing powerful weight loss drugs to patients who had no need of them.

Lehman’s problems began way back in 1992 when his medical license was suspended for a year and he was placed on 10 years probation for fraudulent bills sent to insurance companies.

It is estimated that between 26.4 million and 36 million people abuse opioids worldwide, with an estimated 2.1 million people in the United States suffering from substance use disorders related to prescription opioid pain relievers in 2012 and an estimated 467,000 addicted to heroin, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.