tool name

Thursday, Jun. 21, 2007

DOCTORED DIPLOMAS

A TRAIL OF BOGUS CLAIMS AND LIFE-THREATENING CONSEQUENCES

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- When prosecutors here talked about the cruelty of John E. Curran, it was the face of Taylor Alves they saw.

The young woman, who, at 18, was a filmmaker, photographer and model, was described by her mother as "born with wings." She was also dying of ovarian cancer.

Curran, who billed himself as a natural healer and physician, told her he could make her healthy with a green drink, a concoction of powdered vegetables in water. The promise of recovery led her to spend her final weeks refusing other food.

"He did so much harm on so many levels," Rhonda Alves, Taylor's mother, said recently. "I don't blame John Curran for Taylor dying. What I blame John Curran for is the anguish he brought to her life."

In August, Curran, who charged most patients a standard fee of $10,000 for his treatments, was sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison on charges of wire fraud and money laundering.

Curran, 41, followed the same course of study as two men who appeared on the Kentucky medical scene: Andrew E. Michael and Larry Lammers.

Michael was welcomed to Lexington's Central Baptist Hospital in 2003 and briefly observed heart specialists there treating patients.

In 2004, Lammers cared for patients at several accident injury clinics in the state. Lammers and Michael have also been convicted of practicing medicine without a license and have received jail sentences.

Curran, Michael and Lammers all worked toward medical degrees from online schools that were promoted from the remote mountain community of Falcon, Ky. There, sitting at a computer, was the man behind the schools -- Stephen J. Arnett, 47, who had been a Free Will Baptist minister before becoming involved in the medical field, court records say.

Arnett first opened several medical clinics in Eastern Kentucky, where he worked without a license as an assistant to the very doctors he hired. When the clinics closed, he moved on to promoting various online schools that offered degrees in medicine and naturopathy -- a system of healing with natural substances. The schools were neither accredited nor licensed.

Yet the people who received degrees from the schools that Arnett promoted opened real clinics, practiced in real offices and treated real patients.

In a private practice near Providence, for example, Curran "told healthy people they were sick and critically ill people that he could heal them," said Bruce W. McIntyre, an attorney for the Rhode Island Board of Health. "His level of greed was only exceeded by his cruelty."

There is controversy over whether the schools Arnett was associated with were "diploma mills," Internet Web sites that award a degree based on money and little work. According to a number of states that investigate such sites, they were. According to those associated with them, they were not. There is no national or Kentucky agency that monitors online schools.

Diploma mills generally have no faculty, little or no course work and either no physical campuses or inadequate ones.

There are scores of accredited colleges and universities that offer online courses and degrees. But many diploma mills have sophisticated Web sites that look no different from those of legitimate schools.

Arnett has been investigated by state officials for more than a decade but never prosecuted. He has been free to open clinics, assist physicians and place would-be doctors in hospitals and clinics.

He declined to comment for this article and has not responded to telephone calls, certified letters or e-mail messages. When a reporter knocked on his door, he refused to answer any questions and threatened to call the police. The man he identified as his attorney, C. Tom Anderson of Pikeville, also did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The most prominent of the schools Arnett has been associated with is St. Luke School of Medicine, which has had a number of incarnations. St. Luke and its Southern Graduate Institute -- a division that focused on naturopathy -- are central to the criminal cases against Curran, Michael and Lammers.