I worked for this regulatory body, the one that takes doctors and medical people to court when they do something wrong… usually six months after the fact when the damage’s been done. I had nothing to do with that, I just published the press releases.
99% of the time they do their job and stop bad actors, but you don’t hear about those times. They just aren’t very good at selling their successes. Let me tell you about a press release I read that will make you glad these regulators are doing their job:
There would this guy who would pose as an aged care worker, go up to all these old men, find the most jaundiced and malnourished of them, and use tweezers to just lift up their curved and yellowed toenails.
He said they were held in place with only the slightest adhesive, as if you were peeling a stack of post-it notes from their base.
The toenails would lift away with the gaseous puff of a poisonous mushroom, and these old men, so inebriated and enfeebled, were completely indifferent, completely unaware of what was happening.
And so from there, this man would take those toenails, stick them in a jar, fill it with vinegar and leave them to pickle, inducing a further translucence, going from a cloudy opaqueness to just a yellow tint.
Then, this manwould pose as an optometrist and prescribe these toenails as contact lenses to his patients.
The thing that got him reported wasn’t the fact his contact lenses were several times thicker than standard. His patients had to peel back their eye lids to insert them, and then there was a visible bulge when the eye was closed.
It wasn’t the rather suspicious calcium deposits that were found on many of his ‘contact lenses’ either. You’d think if you were being given contact lenses, and they were these thick, misshapen things covered in white spots you’d start asking questions, apparently not.
Nor was it the fact that they didn’t work. Because they’re not contact lenses, they’re fucking toe nails. They were incredibly painful to put in, described as being grating against the eyes, as if you were to polish your eyes with sandpaper, as evidenced by the deep fissures seen in the eyes of many of his patients.
No, the complaint came from a woman who went to see him, put these giant, painful contact lenses in, and then one slipped around to the back of her eye.
This massive toenail managed to get right back around, applying pressure to the optic nerve. Imagine someone poking you in the eye, but from the inside.
And that’s not what did it, she kept going back to this guy. He kept prescribing her toe nails, she kept putting the toe nails in, and the toe nails would keep slipping around the back of her eye.
It got to the point when her eye was bulging out, red, swollen, and weeping, described as on the verge of prolapse, that she had trouble blinking. The guy realised he was in over his head and reported himself.
So they hit him with the tribunal, fined his arse, and banned from practice. Turns out he was never registered. It’s all on the website, look it up.
Right at the end of the release, they asked him the question you’re all wondering, ‘why, why toenails?’
He said, ‘Well, old men usually have two large toe nails, most people usually have two eyes, it just made sense.’
Does it?