In a horrific story of apparent profit over humanity, a US oncologist subjected patients to years of unnecessary mental, emotional and physical anguish by treating them for cancers they never had.
Anthony Olson wanted a career, children, and a partner with whom he could hike, and despite the diabetes diagnosis at age four, the anaemia, the kidney transplant that failed when he was 29, and the dialysis, he clung to those dreams.
But in early 2011 an oncologist at St Peter’s, diagnosed him with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a blood disorder often described as pre-leukaemia.
The life expectancy of MDS patients is short, reports ProPublica. “He told me that without treatment, I’d be dead before the end of the year,” Olson said. He was 33.
“That diagnosis changed the direction of my life,” said Olson, now 47.
He didn’t know that he was one of many patients who, according to court records, may have received inappropriate, harmful or unnecessary treatments from Thomas Weiner, MD.
Years of practice
Administrators at St Peter’s had suspect Weiner, who directed the hospital’s cancer centre, was hurting patients for years. Yet they allowed him to keep treating people until late 2020, when they suspended and then fired him.
Weiner has denied all the allegations.
“I trusted he was doing what was best for me,” Olson told ProPublica. “I never questioned that.”
Olson’s story is in a cache of records related to an ongoing legal dispute between Weiner and St Peter’s, and his case parallels that of another Weiner patient, Scot Warwick.
Weiner had diagnosed Warwick with stage IV lung cancer and treated him with chemo and other therapies for 11 years, court records show; after Warwick died in 2020, his family learned, from both a biopsy and an autopsy, that he never had cancer.
Weiner insisted Warwick had cancer all those years and that other doctors “missed” the disease.
Olson’s diagnosis was similarly flimsy, and he had been treated over nearly the same period of time. But there was a key difference between the two men: Olson lived to tell his story.
After he was diagnosed, Olson dropped out of college, moved back in with his parents, and began Weiner’s prescribed regimen: four straight days on chemo, four weeks off. Repeat until he died. Olson endured this for nine years.
Olson said as chemo goes, he had it easier than most. He kept most of his hair, for example. But exhaustion from the chemo anchored him to his parents’ basement. He sank into himself, telling loved ones he’d soon be gone. He asked his parents to take his car. His father refused.
Early in his treatment, tests showed the chemo had worsened Olson’s anaemia. Weiner placed him on weekly iron-rich blood transfusions. Over months and then years of chemotherapy and other treatments, Olson bonded with Weiner and St Peter’s staff.
“I thought he was helping me,” Olson said of Weiner. “I actually felt pretty fortunate that we had such a gifted doctor in such a small community.”
His parents, too, believed they’d found “a miracle” in Weiner. Olson appreciated that Weiner had taken over as his primary care physician.
Weiner often fast-tracked patients for hospital stays, which made him popular with patients. It also increased his patient load – as many as 70 patient contacts a day, records show. The more treatments and visits Weiner billed, the more money he made.
In 2016, Robert LaClair, MD, the kidney specialist who was managing Olson’s dialysis, became concerned. After hundreds of blood transfusions, Olson’s body was suffering from “iron overload” (a ferritin level of more than 10 000), which can destroy internal organs.
It could have killed him.
LaClair tweaked Olson’s treatments, which improved his anaemia and iron overload. He told him he could now be a candidate for a new kidney, which would supplant the need for dialysis and maybe allow him to regain his life. The only problem? His chemo treatment disqualified him from the transplant waitlist.
Olson said there were moments of real anger at his situation, “but most of the time, I think I was pretty level, and just did it because it had to be done, and this was the treatment”.
“I was amazed I was still around and that it was working as well as it was.”
By 2019, LaClair suspected Weiner may have misdiagnosed Olson and urged his patient to get a second opinion.
But LaClair kept quiet about his misgivings for years, according to records and interviews.
Weiner was a powerful figure within St Peter’s and in Helena. He was earning $2m a year and had threatened to sue the hospital several times, court records show.
While his nurses adored him, others inside St Peter’s feared him. Some staff said he’d forced out two hospital CEOs who had challenged his pay.
“If any one of us came up against him, we would have been crushed,” LaClair said. “He had too much power and too much money.”
LaClair finally took his concerns to the hospital’s peer review committee, an internal group of doctors charged with examining questions about patient care. In early 2020, he became the committee chair and would lead the effort to remove Weiner. He acknowledged that he and the hospital waited too long to act.
In December 2020, St Peter’s fired Weiner, accusing him of “harm that was caused to patients by receiving treatments, including chemotherapy, that were not clinically indicated or necessary”, among other allegations.
Weiner responded by suing the hospital for wrongful termination and defamation. Former patients created a Facebook group called “We stand with Dr Tom Weiner” and held hundreds of small protests outside the hospital.
A Montana judge dismissed Weiner’s suit. He filed an appeal, which is pending with the state Supreme Court.
When Olson learned that Weiner had been removed, he was outraged, convinced he’d lost a brilliant medical mind, who had been kind and given him years he otherwise would never have seen.
Olson didn’t know that his case was among dozens that St Peter’s sent to outside medical reviewers at the University of Utah and The Greeley Company, a healthcare consultancy.
The reviewers discovered that Weiner had ordered two bone marrow biopsies in 2011. The first showed signs of MDS, which researchers in recent years have found is commonly misdiagnosed. However, the second, taken 10 months later, indicated no disease.
Weiner shared the negative biopsy result with Olson but told him to ignore it; all it proved was that the regimen was working. Weiner continued Olson’s chemotherapy.
That second biopsy, at the very least, should have prompted more testing to confirm or eliminate MDS, the reviewers wrote. It was unclear “why this second bone marrow biopsy result was ignored, and why another bone marrow biopsy was not done”, the report said.
“The patient may have been exposed to the toxicities of these treatments unnecessarily.”
When Weiner was asked about Olson’s case, he dismissed the reviewers’ conclusion that he should have stopped chemotherapy when the follow-up biopsy was negative.
“That doesn’t say you didn’t have the disease,” he said. “It just means the treatment worked, and it knocked it away. It doesn’t mean you didn't have it at the beginning.”
But if the chemo had “knocked it away”, wouldn’t that call for adjusting the treatment?
Weiner told ProPublica he kept Olson on chemo for another nine years on the advice of Mayo Clinic experts.
Olson scoured his medical file and found no evidence to support this claim.
After Weiner left, Olson received another biopsy, which came back negative. St Peter’s also retested the sample from the first biopsy.
It, too, showed that he never had MDS.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that Weiner had misdiagnosed and improperly treated Olson, LaClair felt he couldn’t just say, “Weiner did this to you”.
Records show many Weiner patients bristled when told to get a second opinion or became hostile at the suggestion that Weiner had mistreated them.
“The worst part of the harm is that they believed in him,” LaClair said. “The harm that he’s done to these people – they’re broken both physically and mentally because of what he did.”
After receiving chemo through his 30s and into his 40s, Olson’s cancer treatments were stopped in early 2021.
In a court filing that year, the hospital alleged that Weiner “misdiagnosed and/or failed to properly diagnose numerous other patients whose subsequent chemotherapy treatments may not have been warranted …”
St Peter’s, however, did not provide a full accounting. The hospital reported that it had suspended Weiner to the state medical board, which declined to comment.
But it’s unclear whether St Peter’s relayed Olson’s case or any of the other misdiagnoses to the board. Hospital administrators declined to comment on the case, even though Olson signed a medical privacy waiver granting them permission to talk to this publication.
Presented with examples of alleged patient harm, Weiner denied having mistreated anyone and remained unapologetic. He does acknowledge, however, that Olson suffered for no reason.
“I felt he had MDS,” Weiner said. “I was continuing this medicine to suppress it and control it for as long as possible, because he had no other option. Obviously, if I knew that he never had MDS, I wouldn’t have done it, but I was under the belief from the reports and everything that he should continue it. Now, hindsight says he got it needlessly, and that part of it, I’m sorry about.”
For Olson, the acknowledgement that he didn’t have cancer is 13 years too late. In 2022, he sued St Peter’s for malpractice.
The hospital settled and paid an undisclosed amount. Because Weiner was an employee of St Peter’s, he was not held liable.
No longer overloaded with iron or receiving chemo, Olson became eligible for a donor kidney. In 2023, he got one. He continues to struggle with an array of health issues, but he knows there’s a chance he can live into old age.
He tries not to think about what happened to him, but sometimes wonders what motivated his former oncologist. “Did he just do this for money?”
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