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- NATIONAL
Psychiatrist struck off for sex with patient
An impotent psychiatrist who wrote himself prescriptions for Viagra so he could have sex with a patient during sessions bulk-billed to Medicare has been struck off.
Dr Antonio Aguado was found guilty of professional misconduct by the NSW Medical Tribunal today over a sexual relationship he had for seven months from December 1998 with a patient he was treating for depression.
The tribunal ordered his name be removed from the medical register of practitioners for three years.
The NSW Hunter Valley psychiatrist began to hug, kiss and suck the patient's hands during sessions.
This then progressed to oral sex after the woman brought champagne and strawberries to his East Maitland surgery on Christmas Eve 1998.
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The tribunal said Dr Aguado undressed the woman and performed oral sex because of his impotence.
"The patient became angry and threatened to follow him home and eviscerate his cats and leave the pieces on the front door of his home," psychiatrist Dr Geoff Rickarby, who treated Dr Aguado in January 2000, told the tribunal.
After using supplies of Viagra from drug companies, Dr Aguado wrote two prescriptions of Viagra in a false name, which his lover collected from the chemist.
After the December 24 consultation, the pair had sex in visits three times a week during which "virtually no therapy or counselling" took place, the tribunal was told.
Dr Aguado bulk billed the sessions to Medicare and no longer charged her the gap payment after the pair had become intimate.
The patient, who cannot be named, gave up her job as secretary at a real estate agency after he complained he was not seeing enough of her, she said in her evidence.
The tribunal said the patient loved the practitioner and believed he would leave his wife for her.
Dr Aguado admitted he had sex with the woman but blamed his behaviour on his condition of thyrotoxicosis, which he said impaired his reasoning.
In his testimony, he acknowledged that the behaviour was against medical ethics but he felt the relationship would help the patient's psychiatric problems.
"As an underlying principal I felt that there was an importance of never making her feel rejected and tolerating the negative aspects of her as well as the positive," he said.
"I felt that the relationship with one another was curative in itself."
The tribunal, however, rejected the doctor's claim that his medical condition, which results in an excessive amount of thyroid hormones in the blood, was responsible for the unethical conduct.
"The practitioner grossly breached his professional duty to the patient by abusing the trust placed in him and by exploiting her in order to obtain gratification in the full knowledge that she was vulnerable and subject to major psychiatric disability," the tribunal said.
The Health Care Complaints Commission pursued the case after a complaint was lodged by the patient.
His ban from practising becomes effective in two weeks.
AAP
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