Dr. Habad Malik sent shock waves through the local medical community when he left town for a week, entrusting his call system to a generic bottle of ibuprofen left outside of his office with a hand scribbled note saying “take a few every several hours until I return.”
“I was completely blindsided,” said Nancy Holkamp, a patient of the practice with arthritis. “I use naproxen, not ibuprofen. Does he expect me to suffer while he is on vacation?” Even his patients currently on ibuprofen were not satisfied. “He didn’t even bother to leave us brand name Advil. Like how cheap can you get?” complained another patient.
According to Dr. Malik’s website, he specializes in invasive chronic pain procedures that create new pain in a different area of the body to distract you from the current chronic pain that you might have. Often patients will receive relief for about 4-6 months, before requiring a repeat procedure to again distract them from the pain created from the last. “It often becomes a vicious cycle,” confirmed a leading pain specialist in the field. “However we make good money and it’s less risky than prescribing opiates”
Local authorities are currently looking into if any laws were broken. “I’ve just never seen anything like it in my career,” the medical director of St Vincent Hospital stated. “But I doubt the board will come down with any disciplinary action because god knows the rest of us don’t want to deal with these patients.” When reached for comment from the Caribbean, Dr. Malik said next time he will just leave a box of Percocet.
