French Dentist Jailed for Mutilating Patients with Unnecessary Work

- The Guardian, Sept. 8, 2022. - Lionel Guedj got rich by carrying out work on healthy teeth of low-income people in Marseille, court told. -

A multi-millionaire dentist in France has been jailed for deliberately mutilating patients from low-income neighbourhoods of Marseille, in a money-making scheme in which he performed thousands of unnecessary procedures.

Lionel Guedj, 41, was jailed for eight years and his father, Carnot Guedj, 70, who worked part-time for him, was jailed for five years after a court heard harrowing accounts of patients who had booked an appointment for minor issues, such as a cavity or loose crown, and ended up having scores of healthy teeth removed for no medical reason.

The state prosecution team described how Lionel Guedj deliberately harmed healthy patients from the northern quarters of Marseille in order to defraud the social security system. He sought to make maximum profits by forcing unsuspecting patients to undergo unnecessary procedures, showing “total disdain” for their health and then reaping payments from social security.

In one example, between 2006 and 2012, Guedj was accused of performing 3,900 root canals on 327 patients who had no medical need for the procedure, simply because he wanted to fit bridges that would make him money. Dental procedures that normally took 45 minutes to an hour were performed by Guedj in about 10 minutes – many of them resulting in infections, complications or permanent damage...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/08/french-dentist-jailed-over-thousands-of-unnecessary-procedures