The Associated Press State & Local Wire

August 5, 1999, Thursday, AM cycle

State medical board disciplines four doctors

SECTION: State and Regional

LENGTH: 447 words

DATELINE: BOSTON

The state Board of Registration in Medicine has taken disciplinary action against four doctors – including a psychiatrist who proposed to a patient and an internist who asked explicit sexual questions while conducting a pelvic exam, the board said Thursday.
At its July 28 meeting, the board revoked the license of Dr. Edward E. Gilmour, a psychiatrist currently living in New Mexico. The board found that he had crossed the line physically, socially, even economically, with one of his patients.
Penelope Wells, the board’s acting executive director, said Gilmour deeded his Barnstable home to his patient. He also made a marriage proposal to her.
“He really lost his professional judgment,” she said.
Between 1993 and 1994, Gilmour treated a patient who claimed she had been sexually abused as a child and was repeatedly victimized by men as an adult, according to board documents.
Occasionally, he would treat her at the trailer in which she lived, in sessions that sometimes exceed two or three hours.
At one point, he proposed marriage. Their only sexual contact was hugging and kissing, the board said.
Gilmour did not immediately return a telephone call from The Associated Press on Thursday.
A doctor whose license has been revoked cannot petition for reinstatement for at least five years.
The board said Dr. Luis Deschamps agreed to an indefinite suspension of his limited license to practice medicine in the state.
He had been a resident at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield on May 7, 1998, when he was found to have asked inappropriate sexual questions during an unchaperoned pelvic examination of a patient with a history of cervical cancer.
The suspension is retroactive to May 8, 1998.
A telephone listing for Deschamps had been disconnected.
The board also revoked the license of Dr. Peter J. Embriano, an ophthalmologist currently in prison in Connecticut.
Embriano was convicted last year of mail fraud and false claims related to unperformed laser eye surgeries and improperly performed and medically unnecessary diagnostic tests, the board said.
He also had been convicted of filing false tax returns in 1994.
He had been licensed in Massachusetts in 1983, but did not appear to have been practicing here.
Dr. David G. Burkett, an internist now living in Louisiana, voluntarily resigned his right to practice medicine in Massachusetts. In Louisiana, he was found to have been abusing alcohol and lost his privileges at three hospitals there.
He was licensed in Massachusetts in 1985.
Many doctors who attend medical school in the Boston area get licensed to practice in Massachusetts, even though many never work here, Wells said.