Medicine: Phony Physicians

Becoming a doctor requires years of study and hard work. Getting listed in the telephone directory as a physician, which may make it possible to lure patients and prescribe some medicines, can be surprisingly easy. Several areas pro vide effective safeguards against phony physicians. Anyone asking to be listed as a doctor in St. Louis, for example, is first checked out with the city and county medical societies. In Cleveland, the names of those wanting to be listed in the Yellow Pages as physicians or surgeons are submitted to the state licensing board for authentication. But in many metropolitan areas,...

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