State Suspends Schneider License
By Ron Sylvester, The Wichita Eagle, Kan.
Jan. 30–More than a month after a federal judge found Stephen Schneider to be a danger to the community, the Kansas Board of Healing Arts suspended the Haysville physician’s license.
The action Tuesday closed the Schneider Medical Clinic, where a physician assistant had continued to dispense prescriptions with minimal supervision, despite Schneider’s imprisonment.
A federal grand jury indictment in December accused Schneider and his wife, Linda, a nurse, of running a “pill mill” that illegally dispensed medications.
Connie White, the physician assistant, said the board told her the clinic could no longer see patients.
“We can be open just for copying medical records,” White said.
Although White quivered near tears Tuesday, concerned about the clinic’s patients, another Wichita physician said they should have no problem finding appropriate care.
“I think the medical professionals here are going to be able to absorb this need in our community,” said Joe Davison, a family practice doctor serving on the state’s Controlled Substance Monitoring Task Force.
“Schneider’s practice was big, but it wasn’t too big.”
White said she’d been working under the direction of Joseph Sack, another Wichita physician.
The Board of Healing Arts said in its order Tuesday that Sack reviewed White’s notes and charts on weekends and consulted by phone. The order said that White’s continued functioning at the clinic appears to be in violation of state law since Sack did not regularly meet patients or receive calls at the clinic.
The Schneider clinic specialized in treating chronic-pain patients, including the prescribing of potent, addictive and potentially dangerous medications.
Schneider had been under investigation since federal agents raided his clinic in September 2005.
The following May, the Board of Healing Arts began looking into taking disciplinary action against the doctor. The board filed two petitions against Schneider’s license, the latest in November.
But lawyers for the licensing board said the doctor must be considered “an imminent danger to the community” before they could take emergency action to shut down his practice.
Then on Dec. 20, a grand jury charged the Schneiders with 34 criminal counts involving the distribution of medicines and their billing for services through government programs such as Medicaid and Medicare.
The next day, U.S. Magistrate Don Bostwick said Schneider posed a danger to the community and ordered him held in jail without bond to await trial. Bostwick said that Schneider could continue to supervise and dispense prescriptions through the clinic, even on bail.
From the clinic on Tuesday, White said she was upset, wondering where the patients would go for treatment.
“We’ve given our patients a list of people who specialize in the management of chronic pain,” White said. “But unless things have changed, our patients tell us as soon as they’ve said they are patients of the Schneider clinic, the doctors refuse to see them.”
But Davison said he accepted a former Schneider patient Tuesday.
“She said she’d never seen a doctor, just a physician’s assistant,” Davison said. “But we went through this step by step. We’re going to take a complete medical history. And she realizes two things. First, I’m always going to treat her with the lowest possible degree of pain medication that does the job. And second, I’m not going to let her suffer.”
According to the grand jury indictment, some of Schneider’s patients received strong prescription painkillers too easily and too frequently.
White said patients at the Schneider clinic had been told they might have to seek treatment at local emergency rooms.
But that would not be an appropriate remedy, said Alice Bell, the director of service lines for emergency and trauma at Via Christi Regional Medical Center.
“Chronic pain management is a very complex issue, and an emergency room is not the ideal place to treat these kinds of patients,” Bell said.
The Schneiders’ indictment lists 56 accidental overdoses of patients who received medication at the Haysville clinic during the past five years.
The Board of Healing Arts, in its order Tuesday, called the accounts of the deaths “shocking at best.”
The board found “that the only way to ensure that (Schneider’s) continued practice of the healing arts does not constitute an imminent danger to public health and safety is to suspend the respondent’s license to practice the healing arts.”
Reach Ron Sylvester at 316-268-6514 or rsylvester@wichitaeagle.com.
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