CO Coach wrote:
Carl Lewis isn’t even a distance runner, there’s more going on here than just overtraining, which is why he got banned. What does a USADA ban mean for a doctor anyway? It’s not like he lost his medical license. How can USADA prevent him from seeing track athletes as patients? It seems like a doctor prescribing prescription drugs outside of their intended uses, and making questionable diagnosis (such as a healthy sprinter in their prime having hypothyroidism), should have real charges brought against them and loose their medical license.
A USADA ban means he can't get a trackside credential. And I guess USATF won't put him on the speaker's list for its various conventions and clinics. He can continue to see athletes as patients if they choose to see him, but this would involve a risk of a ban by the athletes for prohibited association, so I don't think there are many that would choose that. Dr. Brown does seem to have a certain amount of pride in his association with successful athletes, so the penalty isn't nothing, but it is not that substantive either.
USADA was cooperating with the Texas Medical Board to try to see if Dr. Brown could be sanctioned. The state of those proceedings is unclear. His license is still in good standing with no disciplinary proceedings noted on the Texas Medical Board page. They may not release anything until proceedings are concluded. The findings noted that Nike was paying for Dr. Brown's defense before the Texas Medical Board as well. It was unclear if that was concluded or ongoing, etc.
Doctors prescribe prescription drugs outside of their intended uses all the time. It is an accepted part of medical practice. Whether his particular prescribing was within acceptable practice is debateable. There is some information in the literature about prescribing thyroid medications for subclinical hypothyroidism, and Dr. Brown is a long serving endocrinologist so he is not without defenses and his clinical judgments may receive some deference. The issues would be 1. Whether he is correctly diagnosing 2. whether he is clearly delineating the risks and benefits to his patients 3. whether he is prescribing purely for athletic benefit. I would suggest that we on this board won't be able to discern these things very clearly. I think he would pretty clearly be subject to some sort of sanction for poor record keeping, but this would probably sentence him to more continuing medical education in that area (i.e. barely a real sanction at all).
Dr. Brown is 70 years old and has been a practicing endocrinologist in Texas for at least 40 years. So, if things go against him, he can likely just quietly retire.