BOSTON (MA)
Boston Magazine
June 5, 2019
By Michael Damiano
Sexual misconduct, sloppy—sometimes catastrophic—mistakes, and a medical board that’s been known to look the other way. Local physicians keep getting away with bad medicine, but you may never know who they are until it’s too late.
When retired police sergeant Charles Antonio went under the knife of Michael Medlock, he was confident the neurosurgeon would eliminate the numbness in his fingers and toes, alleviate the pain in his legs, and improve his faltering balance due to compression in his spinal cord. After all, like many of us, Antonio believed Massachusetts had some of the best doctors in the country. He’d scoured the Internet for any information he could discover about his surgeon, though in truth he couldn’t find much: merely that Medlock was chief of neurosurgery at the Partners-affiliated North Shore Medical Center–Salem Hospital and had worked at Mass General, one of the top-ranked hospitals in the world. Now, on a gurney rolling toward the operating room, Antonio felt butterflies in his stomach, but he was comforted by the knowledge that the man who would be carving into his neck was a well-credentialed and experienced pro.
But things didn’t go as planned. Within days of the operation in September 2015, Antonio began suffering what he now describes as “ungodly pain” in his neck and shoulders. Antonio says he returned to Medlock, who prescribed opioid painkillers, ran some tests, and sent him home. Then things got worse. Antonio started hallucinating and verbally abusing his wife, Linda. He flushed the painkillers down the toilet, saying, “I’m not getting hooked on these. I’ve seen people addicted to drugs and liquor.” Still, the pain continued and his balance worsened, and by late October his condition had deteriorated to the point that he had to be hospitalized at the same facility where Medlock had operated on him a month earlier.
While Antonio was in his hospital room, he and Linda said another physician walked in with an update. The doctor knew Antonio was fond of Medlock and announced that Medlock was considering operating on Antonio again. Then the doctor offered a subtle yet chilling warning: “If I were you, Charlie,” Antonio recalls him saying, “I would find a new friend.”
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