A MANIAC CALLED DOCTOR DEATH

The horrific medical procedures of Christopher Duntsch

By Greg Norman

Fox News
September 11, 2018

A new podcast that's taken the Dallas community by storm is revealing the sickening details of the intentionally-botched medical procedures carried out by a neurosurgeon dubbed “Dr. Death” – surgeries which killed two patients and left others paralyzed.

The 6-part series features numerous interviews with Robert Henderson, a spinal surgeon who describes concerns among area hospital staff in 2012 after examining patients who underwent operations at the hands of Christopher Duntsch, who's now serving a life sentence.

“To put it bluntly, I’m concerned whether or not he has had any training whatsoever in spine surgery,” Henderson is heard saying in a phone call to the president of a facility where Duntsch had worked.

“This guy is a maniac,” he continued in the latest episode of ‘Dr. Death,’ released Monday. “I’m trying to stop this guy from being let operate anywhere, any time, any place.”

Henderson said four days prior to that call, he was summoned into the Dallas Medical Center to examine Mary Efurd, a patient of Duntsch’s who has been wheelchair-bound since she lost the feeling in her legs following a back surgery procedure.

Henderson said he studied the X-rays and notes Duntsch had made before the operation, detailing how he was to go about it.

But Henderson quickly learned “the procedure that he intended to do was not the procedure that he did perform."

“I’m really thinking that some kind of travesty occurred here because he hasn’t done virtually anything that he intended to do or that he described in the operation,” Henderson told show host Laura Beil.

Duntsch was arrested in July 2015 on five aggravated-assault charges after four of his patients were left crippled and two others died in the span of one year, between July 2012 and June 2013.

He went on trial in 2017 in a case which featured testimony from Henderson, who said he found implants placed on muscle instead of bone, and a screw drilled into Efurd's spinal cavity.

Jurors also heard from other patients, including one who woke from surgery paralyzed from the neck down, another who passes out from chronic pain and a third who talks in a permanent whisper after she was left with a puncture wound in her throat.