North Jersey pain doctor settles spine surgery suit for $425,000

A North Jersey anesthesiologist who performed spine surgery at a same-day surgery center has settled a malpractice suit by one of his patients for $425,000. The operation by Richard A. Kaul led to a state investigation and the revocation of Kaul’s medical license.

THE PATIENT, 54, is scheduled to receive a total of $615,000 from Kaul; Dr. Shams Qureshi, a pain doctor at the center who also cared for her; and the Bergen Passaic Ambulatory Surgery Center.

Kaul performed the seven-hour, three-level spinal fusion operation in July 2008. He was neither an orthopedist nor a neurosurgeon and had received only three weeks of hands-on training in minimally invasive spinal surgery – on cadavers in South Korea.

Before setting up practice in New Jersey, Kaul had been convicted of manslaughter in England for the death of a dental patient whose anesthesia he administered. He was able to renew his New Jersey medical license, obtained a few years earlier, because no criminal background check was necessary. When he operated on the Plaintiff he had no admitting privileges at New Jersey hospitals and operated only at ambulatory surgery centers.

A surveillance video that Kaul made and posted on YouTube shows the Plaintiff bent over at the waist and walking with a cane. Kaul titled the video, “The Dishonest Patient,” and the film’s narrator said it “casts a light of truth on the corrupt underbelly of frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits.”

The narrator said the Plaintiff “walks briskly around her garden without a care in the world, and no indication of pain or disability,” although the images contradicted that description.

The Plaintiff learned about Kaul’s prior record after the operation when she sought help for unremitting pain from Dr. Robert Heary, a neurosurgeon at what was then the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. “I didn’t want to walk around like Igor for the rest of my life,” she said in a deposition in her lawsuit, explaining why she consulted Heary.

This case was among the 11 cited when the state attorney general moved to suspend Kaul’s license in June 2012. Kaul appealed and a trial was held, with the result that the state Board of Medical Examiners, which licenses doctors, revoked Kaul’s license in February.

Kaul lacked training as a spine surgeon, and his continued practice placed the public in “clear and imminent” danger, the board found.

Kaul’s neglect of FK in the state’s complaint, and 10 other patients was so egregious that the board went beyond a state judge’s recommendation and levied a $300,000 penalty on Kaul – $20,000 for each count in the complaint. It also ordered him to pay the state’s expenses of $174,000.

But Kaul “has not yet paid any of the civil fine or cost reimbursement,” a spokesman for the board said last week. He requested and was granted an extension until July 21, while his businesses were sold in bankruptcy court.