Even Doctors Cry: Love, Death, Scandal and a Terribly Flawed Medical System

by Alvin Reiter

Even Doctors Cry tells the story of Dr. Alvin Reiter, a successful Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, his love for his profession and pride in his work. ''I always felt like Clark Kent putting on my surgical outfit, '' Reiter wrote about his transformative role. Then came a time when even Superman could not help. In 1994, Alvin was diagnosed with incurable Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and given less than a 40% chance of living 6 years, while his wife Karen was diagnosed with early breast cancer in 1999 and given a 95% chance of total cure. The doctor survived, but Karen did not. She died of metastatic breast cancer in May 2003. Her premature death was aided and abetted by her oncologist, breast and liver surgeons and the gross failure of the medical system in which human error, negligence and hubris can, and did, take a life. The facts are chilling and irrefutable. In the midst of Karen's struggle for life, Reiter became the pawn of some of his ''respected'' colleagues as part of an FBI investigation. Faced with the onset of Karen's disease, he was forced to reevaluate his place in the medical establishment. Up until the time of her illness, he had been living for his surgery, his patients, his wife, their cats and their garden. Sadly, his paradise was a fool's paradise. He had not idea what evil lurked under the Southern California sun.

388 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2010

About the author

Alvin Reiter M.D. is a board certified facial plastic surgeon who wrote a personal tale of medical mishaps that reads like a medical thriller. Dr. Reiter has practiced in his field of facial plastic and reconstructive surgery for over twenty-five years in Beverly Hills, California. He received his medical degree in New York City and did his extensive post-graduate training in New York and California.

Reviews

[Sarah Beaudette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alvin Reiter leads an unlikely life. As a sickly Jewish kid from the Bronx, Reiter couldn't have imagined in the 1950s that he would grow up to become a plastic surgeon to Beverly Hills' rich and famous, still less that he would be diagnosed with with Hodgkin's Lymphoma in his early forties, or that as he battled cancer he would be indicted by the FBI for billing fraud crimes he didn't commit. Reiter's story is part memoir, part exposé, and part cautionary tale for anyone embarking on their own cancer odyssey.

Reiter's choice to pursue medicine was a practical one. He had good grades, but he wasn't technical enough to be an engineer; medicine was the next best thing. After a grueling five years of medical school and a surgical internship, Reiter followed a colleague's advice and moved to California, where he would fulfill a residency and become an Ear, Nose, & Throat specialist. When he bought part of a practice in L.A., Reiter drummed up a side career as a plastic surgeon, and in the late 1970s found himself at the very heart of the plastic boom. As plastic surgery exploded in popularity, so did insurance fraud. Surgeons would happily operate on patients who couldn't afford to pay, and bill the patients' insurance providers for correcting medical conditions that didn't exist. Reiter was drawn into the scandal when he allowed his mentor/partner to handle the billing for his surgeries, and found out later that his partner was sending him patients whose insurance providers would be duped. Once Reiter was indicted by the FBI, he discovered that his mentor had been gambling both their careers by participating in several other scams, all of which Reiter would be accused of when the FBI took their case to federal court.

While it's interesting to read about the vagaries of plastic surgery from an insider, Reiter's innocence is eventually borne out and the truly compelling part of his story begins. In 1993, Reiter was diagnosed with lymphoma and given a less than 50% chance of 5 year survival. After chemotherapy, he went into a miraculous remission that lasts to this day. When he was declared cancer free in 1998, he had no idea that the real battle was yet to come. Reiter's wife Karen was diagnosed with breast cancer soon after Reiter went into remission, and was given a 95% chance of survival. Her death in 2003 was entirely preventable, and the series of negligent decisions made by the rockstar doctors who attended her comprise the real meat of the book.

After a double mastectomy and multiple surgeries, Karen's cancer continued to spread. Her doctors had forgone the scans that would have revealed the cancerous areas they missed in their surgeries. Leaders in their field, Karen's doctors spent more time jet-setting and speech giving than attending to their patients, sometimes failing even to read through Karen's medical history. Anyone who has cancer, who has a family member with cancer, or who will encounter cancer in the future, (I guess that's everyone), will benefit from the horror story of Karen's last few years. Namely, that you should demand the scans and tests you think you need even when imperious experts dismiss you, that world-renowned doctors are not necessarily more effective than local ones, and that above all, it's worth going through 50 of them to find the one you trust.

Reiter's story, written in an approachable style, is both tragic and comforting. His stated goal is to help other families avoid the the heartaches he and Karen suffered as they were told time and time again by careless doctors that Karen was fine when she was not. Though my own family has a moderate amount of longevity, cancer seems to be what gets all of us in the end, and I'm much better prepared to handle it now than before I read Reiter's memoir. So in me at the very least, he's achieved his goal.