Are Malpractice Caps Causing More Bad Doctors to Relocate to Texas?
A Missouri doctor who relocated to Austin after a series of professional and legal tangles is seeking to practice medicine in Texas.
Dr. Alexander Kalk — whose application to practice in Texas has been pending since May 31, according to the Texas Medical Board — faces disciplinary action before the Missouri Board of Healing Arts. A hearing On the allegations against him was postponed last Wednesday so he could negotiate a possible settlement with the board over the six-count complaint, said Tina Steinman, the board’s executive director.
“We’re settling for some type of, discipline,” which could include Kalk’s surrender of his medical license in Missouri or some lesser action, Steinman said.
The Missouri board investigated Kalk, who is about 39 and reported graduating from Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, and accused him of violating Missouri drug laws by not keeping narcotics and other dangerous drugs secure at his St. Louis-area office. The board’s allegations also include unprofessionalism, incompetence, negligence and unethical behavior.
It accuses him of sending threatening e-mails to a possible contractor; writing checks to employees that later bounced; berating employees and patients; inappropriately examining a female patient with no female nurse present and offering to help remove the patient’s underwear; making a false, police report in 2006; and, for a time, living at his medical office, failing to bathe for a week and wearing the same clothes without washing them for seven days.
Kalk, lists an address in Austin as his current residence on the Texas application.
In December 2006, an investigator with the Missouri Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs visited Kalk’s office, then in Creve Coeur, Mo., and found that he lacked records, locks and security over narcotics and other controlled substances, said Mike Boeger, interim administrator of the narcotics board.
“He basically had no log of what he received or dispensed,” Boeger said. “It was a bad security violation.”
The narcotics board put Kalk on probation for five years in 2008 so he could no longer buy or stock controlled drugs at his practice, Boeger said. He could still prescribe drugs.
“He closed his practice and moved away,” Boeger said.
Also in 2006, Kalk was arrested on a charge of filing a false police report. He was found guilty in 2008 and fined $500 but is appealing, according to the circuit clerk’s office in St. Louis.
The false report was mentioned in the board’s complaint as “an offense which involves moral turpitude.”
The board hopes to resolve the negotiations with Kalk “in a week or two,” Steinman said. Texas Medical Board spokeswoman Jill Wiggins said she could not comment on pending applications.
