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http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/02/dr_rolando_arafiles_antivaccine_rhetoric.phpDr. Rolando Arafiles: Antivaccine rhetoric topped off with colloidal silver for the flu and Morgellons disease -- "Remember how I've been following the story of two Texas nurses who were fired and prosecuted on trumped up charges, first in September and then a couple of days ago as the case went to trial? Of course you do. I made it very, very plain that I view this malicious prosecution to be a horrific miscarriage of justice that will have a potentially grave chilling effect on nurses who witness physician misconduct and want to report it. After all, Anne Mitchell, RN and Vickilyn Galle, RN found themselves facing jail for doing nothing more than living up to their professional code of ethics when they reported Dr. Rolando Arafiles, Jr. of Winkler County Hospital in Texas for dubious practices, including hawking supplements that he sells to patients in the county health clinic and Winkler County Hospital ER. The nurses reported him through hospital channels and, a couple of months later, were fired without explanation. They reported Dr. Arafiles to the Texas Medical Board, and when Dr. Arafiles was notified of the anonymous complaint against him he went straight to his good buddy Winkler County Sheriff Robert L. Roberts, who happened to have been a patient of his. This good ol' boy left no stone unturned, hunting down these two nurses with a single-minded determination that one can only hope he devotes to hunting down real criminals. Then, in cahoots with Winkler County Attorney Scott Tidwell punished these nurses by prosecuting them for "misuse of government information" and HIPAA violations, even though the Texas Medical Board wrote a scathing letter pointing out that neither of them had done anything wrong.
Although the prosecutor dropped Galle from the case, the unethical and abusive prosecution continued against Mitchell. As it is going on, it makes me think. What about Dr. Arafiles? In my last two posts, I've taken him at face value. Having read the reports I thought that perhaps he was into a bit of woo and a bit of hawking supplements on the side, an unfortunately not-too-uncommon phenomenon. Maybe he isn't a particularly good doctor (well, it's almost certain that he isn't). Overall, he sounds very run-of-the-mill. Mike Dunford showed me I was wrong in this.
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Couple all this with Dr. Arafiles' promotion of vaccine exemptions, his links to anti-vaccine sites like this one, his links to sites like Morgellon Disease and his trying to convince people that the H1N1 and seasonal flu vaccines are not effective, and it looks like we have an anti-vaccine loon in Kermit, TX going after nurses who called him out on his practices. But it's even worse than that. Dr. Arafiles appears to be selling colloidal silver for Morgellons disease. Whether you accept the existence of Morgellons disease or not is irrelevant in this instance. The reason is that colloidal silver is pure quackery when used against the flu in my not-so-humble opinion. It's also pure quackery when used against Morgellons, and heavy users can turn into Papa Smurf. While it's true that various silver compounds are used as topical antibiotics (one such compound is commonly used in burn patients), they aren't useful as antibiotics when ingested because the concentration required for them to work is too high and the potential for problems (i.e., the Papa Smurf syndrome) too high. So what we have here appears to be an anti-vaccine loon of a doctor who is e selling serious woo like colloidal silver and a very expensive water alkalinizer for $1495 (what a bargain!) on his website. Meanwhile, he's actually testified in this case that diabetics heal as well as anyone else. Funny, but that's not what they taught me in medical school and surgery residency. Maybe those days as an intern in the "foot room" at the Cleveland Wade Park V.A., where I got to see diabetic foot ulcers up close and personal until I couldn't get the smell out of my nose and mouth the entire month I rotated on the vascular surgery service, were just my imagination.
Oddly enough, I hadn't known that Dr. Arafiles was that bad the first time I wrote about how he got the Sheriff, who had been a patient and appears to have been in business with him in the past selling supplements, to be his personal instrument of vengeance against nurses who stood up for science-based medicine and called him out, and I didn't know up until yesterday evening that he was this bad. Mea culpa. I should have done this digging in September when I first wrote about this case. However, I do know now, and as a result I'm even more appalled at this case than I was when I first found out about it. Not only is it the biggest miscarriage of justice in medicine I can recall having seen in many years, but it really is a case of using the law maliciously to prevent supporters from science-based medicine from acting against practitioners of dubious "alternative" medicine."
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It's a long piece, and it adds some bizarre twists to an already bizarre story.
To donate to the nurses legal defense fund, go to: http://www.texasnurses.org/
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