The Strange Case of Dr. Schmidt

He worked wonders with chronic-pain patients. So why was the university so eager to get rid of him?

A A A Comments By Alan Prendergast Thursday, Sep 20 2001

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Casas has had only sporadic relief from her Medtronic implant; her experience falls somewhere between the dramatic relief provided to Nyla Bailey and the aggravation and discomfort endured by Cindy Breece. Still, she says she is grateful to Schmidt for taking her pain seriously, and she is now interviewing other patients for a master's thesis on women and pelvic pain.

"Nobody looks at the body as an integrated unit," Casas says. "I'll bet I've seen forty doctors. I've had nine surgeries. When the doctors get to a point where they don't know what the problem is, then they decide you're crazy or 'drug-seeking.' One of the ladies I interviewed, a doctor asked her why she was spending so much time focusing on that area of her body. I don't think there's a good understanding of pain and how it works."

You're brilliant, you're fired: Richard Schmidt says power struggles at UCHSC doomed his thriving research program.

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The first rule of medicine is to do no harm. But Schmidt says the horrendous power struggle that raged through the Health Sciences Center in recent years only increased the pain, for doctors and patients alike.

"The harm is enormous," he says. "You get people of marginal skills in power who direct the philosophy of care. You've got all these guys doing inappropriate surgeries. Women getting hysterectomies who shouldn't be getting them. Men getting prostatectomies who shouldn't be getting them. Nobody sitting back and saying the data isn't right. I never got the sense that the culture here was capable of asking the right questions, to be critical of its own efforts."

Schmidt has taken another ancient maxim to heart: He's leaving the state to heal himself. The pain left behind in Colorado is now someone else's problem.