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00:01She had diabetes and she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and with depression.
00:09Her mom became alarmed at the amount of pills that her daughter was taking.
00:18It's like giving them a gun and putting it straight to their head.
00:25Snacks a little bit of somebody operating almost like a witch doctor.
00:30I'm sorry.
00:32I'm sorry.
00:34I'm sorry.
00:49I'm sorry.
00:50I'm sorry.
00:52Chelsea Dockery was a 21 year old young woman who had diabetes.
00:57And as a result of that, she had frequent body pains.
01:01Her body did not produce any insulin whatsoever.
01:05So, you know, she struggled with that.
01:16Her mom had had four back surgeries, all of which had been unsuccessful.
01:21And she had been seeing Dr. Nichols for seven years.
01:25And so when Chelsea began experiencing some pains, her mom trusted Dr. Nichols and referred her daughter over to her.
01:33In the United States, doctors of osteopathic medicine are a little bit different than they are around the world.
01:43I am Dr. Jason Beeman.
01:45I'm a forensic psychiatrist and addiction medicine doctor practicing in Oklahoma.
01:51They are fully licensed physicians that are very similar to MDs, just a little bit of different philosophy in the
02:01way they approach medicine.
02:03First is that the body has the ability to heal itself.
02:08That as an osteopathic physician, we want to minimize medical intervention and allow the body's natural healing processes to take
02:17place if we can.
02:19So historically, osteopathic physicians have been a little bit more skeptical on medications.
02:29Dr. Regan Nichols spends four days a week working at the Sunshine Medical Clinic.
02:36She's the only physician there.
02:38And then she spends one day a week at another medical clinic.
02:42She's trained in general practice.
02:45And so she is basically treating a wide variety of illnesses that people would come to present to her.
02:53So it can range everything from a child who had chicken pox, for example, or some kind of cough or
02:58cold.
02:58A patient coming to her for high blood pressure.
03:06I'm Dr. Joni Johnston. I'm a clinical forensic psychologist and private investigator.
03:12General practitioner, they're like a community doctor.
03:14And I think that because of that, the community starts trusting them.
03:18Because they oftentimes treat the whole family.
03:22I think at this point, her career is really on track.
03:26I think she is developing a good reputation in her community.
03:30This is a town that she's living in of about 55,000 people.
03:34So she's kind of making a name for herself.
03:36And she's developing a regular client base.
03:39She's successful in the community.
03:42At the same time as the Sunshine Medical Clinic is getting established,
03:46in the United States of America, we've got millions in the grip of an opioid addiction.
03:58I am Professor Donna Youngs. I am an investigative psychologist.
04:04We've got this crisis slowly devastating families as they powerlessly watch their loved ones slowly self-destruct.
04:13So this drugs crisis is really swallowing up, particularly the youth of America at this point in time.
04:21One of the most horrific things about the opioid epidemic is that individuals were fine until they went to the
04:29doctor.
04:31They weren't addicted.
04:32They were living life fully.
04:34And then let's say they have a car accident.
04:37And it wasn't the car accident that killed them.
04:40It was the treatment for the car accident that killed them.
04:44There's something horribly wrong with the fact that in 2008, more people were dying of overdoses from prescriptions
04:53than from motor vehicle accidents or firearms.
04:58There's something horribly wrong with that.
05:01The health outcomes are worse when you go to the doctor.
05:13When all of your patients have cancer, that's not a good market for you.
05:18The pharmaceutical companies realized that their patients were dying too quickly and they weren't getting as much money as possible.
05:28They recognized that they had to move out of cancer and into other, quote, non-cancer chronic pain.
05:35In the 1990s, the pharmaceutical manufacturers launched an aggressive, unbranded marketing campaign across the United States,
05:46including Oklahoma, that had millions, if not billions of dollars going towards getting as many people prescribed this as possible.
05:57They were giving doctors trips and golf clubs and all of these gifts and those gifts matter.
06:06And studies have shown that even a meal from a pharmaceutical company will increase your likelihood of prescribing that.
06:14When I was in training, I was still taught that you can't get addicted if you have pain.
06:21And that was the gimmick.
06:23That was the lie that the pharmaceutical companies peddled to all of the physicians.
06:28Physicians in training is that if you have pain, something magical happens to your brain and you can't get addicted.
06:37Just to put that in perspective, it's like saying if I stub my toe, I can't get addicted to heroin.
06:43And when you say it like that, that's kind of ridiculous.
06:46But that's exactly what they were saying is that if you hurt your back, you can't get addicted to Oxycontin.
06:52And we now know that that was a horrible lie that hurt and killed thousands of individuals.
07:00The most important piece of information needed to hold a rattlesnake is to know that it's a rattlesnake.
07:07If I throw you a snake but tell you it's a teddy bear, you're going to get bit.
07:12And that's what these pharmaceutical companies did is they said that these were teddy bears, but really they're rattlesnakes.
07:35Chelsea had struggled with diabetes, struggled with controlled substances that were being prescribed to her,
07:43maybe not taking them specifically as required.
07:48Dr. Nichols, it also diagnosed her at some point with bipolar disorder and with depression.
07:55Her mom became alarmed at the amount of pills that her daughter was taking and was worried that she was
08:03addicted.
08:05Chelsea's mom had asked Dr. Nichols about the medication she was prescribing for Chelsea.
08:11And Dr. Nichols had responded, well, she's 21 years old, I can't talk to you about her medical care, she's
08:19an adult.
08:19And that's true, but Dr. Nichols was very comfortable talking to her at length about her daughter's diabetes,
08:27but then refused to talk to her about the medication prescription.
08:31And so that certainly suggests more that she's hiding the medication that she's prescribing for her daughter.
08:40Chelsea Dockery's mom approached Regan Nichols in concern.
08:45Unfortunately, I think that this backfired. I think that Regan would have interpreted this as not as the concerned mother
08:54that it clearly was,
08:55but to be somebody questioning her judgment, criticizing her.
09:07When Dr. Nichols visited her, she became aware of the fact that Chelsea tested positive for amphetamines.
09:14Dad should have told Dr. Nichols that her patient was getting drugs from someplace else,
09:20and that absolutely should have changed her treatment plan.
09:24But it doesn't appear that Dr. Nichols recognized the valuable intervention point.
09:31Chelsea would have been much better off being transferred to a psychiatric facility,
09:35where she could get some mental health care.
09:38Regan Nichols ends up just sending her home and telling her to keep her prescriptions up.
09:45This young woman's only 21.
09:47She hasn't had a lifetime to build up a tolerance to these medications.
09:51With that kind of dose and volume, you're just asking for a bad outcome.
10:01And within a week after her last prescription that she got from Dr. Nichols, she was dead of an overdose.
10:14Addiction as a disease is a rare creature.
10:18Any other disease, your family rushes to your bedside and they're right there to support you.
10:23Maybe even start up a fundraising campaign for you.
10:26But with addiction, it's not unheard of for people to die alone and isolated from all of their loved ones,
10:35having done damage to relationships in their life.
10:38It's a very horrible way to go.
10:42And it's even worse for the families who are left with the regret and the guilt,
10:46thinking of things that they could have done different.
10:49That maybe I didn't try hard enough.
10:51Maybe if we'd have done this, but ultimately unsuccessful.
10:55And so the family is just left with that guilt that they should have done something different.
11:00There's always going to be this sense of, I think, oftentimes of responsibility, of guilt.
11:07What could I have done?
11:09What didn't I see?
11:10What did I miss?
11:13And certainly if it involves losing a child, which, you know, we know a psychologist is the absolute worst life
11:20stressor or life event that can happen to most people is to lose a child.
11:24I think it's something that changes families irrevocably.
11:40There's something just not quite appropriate about calling a medical clinic the Sunshine Medical Clinic.
11:48It's not consistent with the kind of restrained, risk-adverse, cautious approach that a professional medic should adopt.
12:01In fact, it almost has a slightly cultish ring to it.
12:07Although it seems like a wonderful, optimistic place that she's trying to create,
12:14I think there's some kind of very quiet warning bell going off here already.
12:23This patient was concerned about her over-prescribing prescription opiates.
12:30The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics started investigating that, pulling patient charts.
12:36What they discover is that Reagan has been prescribing dangerous, controlled drugs, drugs that are particularly known to be abused
12:48on the street.
12:52Dr. Nichols didn't limit herself to just the opioids as far as addictive medications go.
12:58There's other classes like benzodiazepines, commonly prescribed like Xanax or clonazepam.
13:06And then also muscle relaxers like Soma.
13:09And Dr. Nichols was prescribing large volumes in multiple different classes of addictive substances.
13:18These things taken together were known on the street as the Trinity.
13:24And were extremely sought after because it mimicked the injection of heroin.
13:34I'm Dane Towery. I'm a Deputy Attorney General for the Attorney General's Office here in Oklahoma.
13:41So they started trying to identify if there was a legitimate medical purpose for all these prescriptions that were being
13:49prescribed.
13:50It was very, very scarce with information.
13:55She's not doing assessment.
13:57There was nothing documented.
13:59In the medical world, if it's not in the chart, it doesn't exist.
14:10Now in medical terms, this is a completely unethical practice.
14:15It's a practice that speaks of a kind of pre-professional, pre-scientific approach to medicine.
14:23It's the kind of practice that smacks a little bit of somebody operating almost like a witch doctor.
14:31Somebody who can sense what the right thing is to do without actually formally diagnosing a patient.
14:39In order to decide what that person needs, you have to meet them.
14:43You have to know their medical records. You have to do an evaluation on them.
14:48Without that information, you may be prescribing medication completely inappropriately for a patient.
14:56The other thing it doesn't allow you to do is to evaluate their risk of addiction or the possibility that
15:02they already are addicted or evaluate for psychological issues or psychological problems.
15:08There's no justifiable reason I can imagine for prescribing these kinds of medications to somebody that you haven't seen before.
15:26There was a lot of indication that she had diagnosed some of her patients with several different psychiatric disorders, depression
15:34or bipolar disorder, panic attacks, and yet she's not referring them out for mental health care or psychiatric care.
15:42She's not referring them out for pain management. She's not doing detailed histories of her patients. She's not getting records
15:50from other treating physicians that they've seen in the past.
15:54It just more and more seems like this is somebody who treats many of her patients when they come in
16:01by writing a prescription based on what they want as opposed to what they need and her making that judgment
16:08as a physician.
16:16It's mind-boggling to think of one physician in a four-year period writing three million prescriptions.
16:24And it's hard to explain it in any other way than almost like a drug dealer.
16:30I mean, I would imagine that there are drug dealers who are giving less drugs in that period of time
16:37than she was.
16:39And in fact, we know that the results of this are tragic.
16:43We know that ten of her patients in the four-year period following 2010 die from overdosing themselves on the
16:52drugs that she has prescribed.
16:55Ten individuals, had they not gone to Dr. Nichols, they'd still be alive.
17:01I like to remind everyone that there's no such thing as a spare Oklahoma.
17:07And those ten individuals had mothers and fathers and husbands and wives and were people who had their whole lives
17:14ahead of them and died because they went to the doctor.
17:36She is called before the board and asked to explain why she wasn't referring them out, why she wasn't doing
17:42more comprehensive assessments of her patients.
17:45And she says, well, my patients just don't want to wait six months to go see a pain management specialist.
17:53It's a shocking thing to say for a medic.
17:56It implies that she believes that her judgment can override standard medical practice.
18:03She essentially says patients came in looking for these medications, that some of them developed a tolerance for these medications
18:12and needed more and more for pain relief, which I think you step back and you kind of go, well,
18:17isn't that a sign of addiction?
18:19The fact that somebody is developing tolerance, but in her mind, it just makes you up the dose.
18:31She told them that she knew that some of her patients had a positive drug screen for other substances.
18:40And yet she would sometimes, quote, fire her patients from her practice when they had a positive drug screen, but
18:47then she would give them a second chance or a third chance.
18:51Dr. Nichols policy of firing and unfiring patients is literally just quite bizarre.
18:59First of all, if a patient is addicted and they're showing signs of addiction that would lead a doctor to,
19:07quote, fire them, the doctor should not do that.
19:10Right. Your patient's addicted.
19:11They have a disease and you wouldn't fire someone for having diabetes.
19:15So you shouldn't fire someone for being addicted.
19:18What you should do is recognize that illness and either treat your patient's addiction or refer them to capable doctors
19:27that could treat the problem that you cause.
19:29But instead, Dr. Nichols would, quote, fire them, turning these patients out on the street, desperate, going through withdrawals.
19:38Opioids can be one of the hardest things to stop using the withdrawal period, which can happen as soon as
19:45like eight to 12 hours after your last dose can be absolutely miserable.
19:50The worst physical symptoms you've ever had in your life, muscle cramping, intense abdominal cramping, fever and chills and sweats,
20:02flu like symptoms, absolutely miserable.
20:06And unfortunately, that's one of the reasons why individuals keep going back to it is that they don't want to
20:13use.
20:13They recognize the addiction, they recognize the harm that it's causing in their life.
20:18They just can't get through the withdrawal period.
20:29Reagan Nichols grew up in the Midwest of the United States of America, moving to Kansas when she was two
20:37years old.
20:40She had a big family, three siblings, lots of cousins around, spent the summers in ranches with the cousins, lots
20:49of outdoor activities.
20:53My senses of a vast, open childhood of freedom.
20:59It's a very wholesome upbringing.
21:02It's one without any sense of strife or struggle.
21:06And it's one where there seems to be a boundless sense of opportunities, very few boundaries, interestingly.
21:15Very little sense of her being in any way restricted or reined in as a child and as an adult.
21:23Everything seems to come easy, like the vast landscape, the great plains that she grew up in.
21:30Everything seems to be open and possible and without limitation.
21:37Reagan was thriving in this kind of small town community.
21:40She was kind of known as really an amazing dog trainer.
21:44As a matter of fact, some of her friends said that when she called her dog, not only would her
21:48dog come, but other people's dogs would come as well.
21:53She liked baking for these kind of local fair competitions.
21:58She liked the outdoors, she liked camping, but she also liked going to museums.
22:03So she really was somebody who was well-rounded and had plenty of friends.
22:16Reagan attended osteopathic medicine school in Des Moines.
22:21And her school was actually known as a pretty prestigious osteopathic medicine school.
22:26In 2023, it had the highest number of passes on the boards.
22:37And then in fact, they go out to Mongolia to do medical education, helping the community there.
22:44It's again a very wholesome, healthy existence that she's living.
22:52There had been a revolution and Mongolia was really trying to transition between a communist-based healthcare system to more
23:00of a capitalistic healthcare system.
23:02There's a lot of need to get up to speed on more Western practices.
23:06And so Reagan and her husband actually spent four years there.
23:11And this was not a luxurious assignment.
23:15It was really, in many respects, kind of an altruistic mission.
23:20This move to Mongolia, I think, just may have cemented the sense of being part of a different elite world,
23:28being somehow the them as opposed to the us.
23:32I think it just may have instilled in her too big a sense of her own judgment power.
23:41It's almost as if she may have started to, somewhere in the back of her mind, see herself as some
23:48kind of saviour.
23:51It just reinforced her sense of her world as opposed to the world of those that she helped.
24:11The volumes are just absolutely unfathomable.
24:17One month, she prescribed thousands of addictive pills.
24:22I don't know any doctors that actually can prescribe thousands of pills of all substances.
24:29But for this one doctor to prescribe thousands of addictive pills of opioids and benzos and muscle relaxers, it's just
24:38unfathomable.
24:46Not only were these individuals visiting 25 different cities to get their prescriptions filled, they were accessing 107 different pharmacies.
24:56Which again, I think just illustrates that something is not right here.
25:00And it also illustrates the scope of the number of prescriptions that she is prescribing to her patients.
25:08That is extremely unusual in a town of that size to have a general practitioner who's got patients that are
25:16basically fanning out to different cities to get their prescriptions filled.
25:21And it makes me wonder where she's getting these patients.
25:25And if they're not local patients, again, how are they hearing of her?
25:30Doctors, lawyers, clergy, ministers, really no class has been left untouched.
25:37We do know that the hardest hit was our blue collar working class individuals.
25:42These are the people that get hurt at work and they can't take a day off to let their body
25:47heal.
25:48And if you tell them, well, I've got a pill that will help you get through the pain, they're going
25:52to take it.
25:53They're going to work through that pain.
25:55They're going to mask it with the opioid.
25:57They're going to get addicted.
25:59Mother Teresa taking these pills long enough would get addicted.
26:02It has nothing to do with the moral character or the will of the individual.
26:08It's just science.
26:09Anyone taking these pills long enough will get addicted.
26:21They released their findings as well.
26:23And they were pretty dramatic.
26:25And they basically said they took a three month period of time in 2014.
26:29And they found that she had prescribed in that period of time over 1,400 prescriptions for controlled substances.
26:37And given that her practice was supposed to be a general practice, that is incredibly excessive.
26:46If you start to see one prescriber prescribing large amounts of those three, an opioid, a benzo and a muscle
26:53relaxer, you're probably looking at a pill mill.
27:03Dr. Nichols was arrested for essentially prescribing these controlled substances knowingly and really without any medical necessity.
27:15The arrest warrant for Dr. Nichols said that she prescribed more than 1,800 opioid pills to five individuals in
27:23the month that they died.
27:25So that's 360 pills per patient.
27:29Assuming that they were getting equal amounts, some might have gotten more, some might have gotten less.
27:34But 360 opioid pills per month comes down to, if you think that a month has 30 days, that is
27:4312 pills per day that these individuals are taking.
27:49That's an incredibly high amount.
27:53When you stop practicing medicine and you just start prescribing controlled substances without any kind of medical judgment, you're a
28:00drug dealer.
28:01And there's no difference between you and somebody who's selling these same pills out on the street for a few
28:08dollars.
28:09You're trying to legitimize yourself as a physician, but really you're just a drug dealer.
28:21We prosecute crimes with the hopes that people will understand, you know, you're not going to get away with it.
28:28You don't commit crimes.
28:29And so we looked at this case.
28:31We believed crimes were committed.
28:33We believed we could prove it.
28:35And we put it to the jury.
28:43It was the jury.
28:44We were just going to die.
28:46We didn't know Michael Praise.
28:51We know Michael Syng.
28:53They were just going to die.
28:54He lived there.
29:07There was an opportunity we could charge it as a murder in the first degree because distribution of a controlled
29:12dangerous substance is one of those predicate crimes that would qualify for murder in the first degree.
29:18And so that carries life or life without parole, which is a very strong punishment as well as it should
29:25be.
29:27And I think we had a bit of an issue with forcing a jury to make that decision because it
29:34wasn't your traditional shooting, stabbing, malice, aforethought type of crime.
29:41And so we looked at murder in the second degree. We thought that would be a better fit. It gives
29:46the jury a lot more wiggle room.
29:58We had 10 other deaths in addition to the five that we charged. I mean, 15 patients, you know, that's
30:06a lot.
30:07We had videos of patients that were just like zombies, you know, passed out in their food or falling asleep.
30:15It's not a way to live. It's not functioning. And of course, their patient charts weren't documented as they should
30:22be.
30:29They basically said, this is somebody who didn't care about her patients.
30:35She knowingly prescribed these medications, that she was essentially operating a pill mill, that she was negligent in her practices,
30:42and that she was responsible for turning many of her patients into addicts.
30:48I tried to explain just how egregious, absolutely egregious, the acts of Reagan Nichols were.
30:56I think one patient had over a thousand pills prescribed to him over the course of a month.
31:01You know, I mean, that's absolutely ridiculous.
31:05I have been a prosecutor for a while now, and unfortunately, I've seen addiction through the lens of deprived actions
31:18involving, you know, young children and their parents who are addicted.
31:23I've seen parents do awful things in order to get their next high.
31:28So I've seen what the beast sort of does to a person, and their will is overborne, right, with the
31:35addiction.
31:36And for some of these individuals that were taking opiates at a very, very high level, significant doses and amounts,
31:48it's like giving them a gun and putting it straight to their head.
31:54And, yeah, they're the ones that pull the trigger, but, I mean, at that point, they're not acting in their
31:58right mind.
32:00It's almost as if, you know, we are protecting those who can't protect themselves at that point, just like we
32:05protect children who cannot protect themselves.
32:18The defence argued that these people had not been forced to take the medications that she'd prescribed to them.
32:26I think this fails to understand both the raw vulnerability, physical and psychological, of these people going to the person
32:37that they trusted, the medical practitioner, the GP, within their community.
32:42And it also fails to recognise the way that Reagan would have been viewed in this small town community as
32:50the physician at the central medical clinic.
32:52A person of respect, a person of respect, a person who was there to help them.
32:58They really focused on the fact that she had no intent to kill anyone, you know, this was not her
33:05fault, and that she actually cared too much about her patients and didn't want to deprive them of what they
33:14needed to, you know, go forth and go on each day.
33:19I think certainly when it came to patient deaths, that she was likely to view this as the problem isn't
33:27that I'm prescribing these medications.
33:30The problem is the patients are taking too many of them.
33:33So I think in her mind, she probably thought, well, this isn't my fault, this isn't my responsibility.
33:39I mean, I'm giving them medications, I'm giving them, you know, muscle relaxants, anti-anxiety medications, opioid medications.
33:47They're asking for them, they're saying they need them, and if they take too many, that's kind of really not
33:55my problem.
33:56Maybe it was a slippery slope for her.
33:57But I do think over the years, she became more and more willing to prescribe medications to anybody and everybody.
34:06And perhaps she didn't think about the consequences, perhaps she blamed the consequences on people who were abusing her prescription
34:14doses, but at some point, she knew patients were dying under her care.
34:26She came across a little detached from the moment, from what was going on, just what was playing out in
34:32front of her.
34:34There wasn't very much emotion there.
34:36There was nothing, it was just blank, just kind of void.
34:41I mean, these are her patients.
34:42I kind of expected a little bit more.
34:45These are people she saw every month, over and over.
34:48And to think that somebody across the room is saying that I'm responsible for the deaths of all these people,
34:54my patients.
34:56While her attorneys are at the same time making the defense that she cared about her patients, I just didn't
35:02see the emotion that I thought I would see.
35:13I remember there being some not-guilties first.
35:16And, you know, your heart kind of sinks a little bit.
35:20You immediately start thinking, what's the difference between count one, count two, and count four, and count, you know.
35:26How could they reach that conclusion and still allow me to have hope for a conviction on the other counts,
35:32right?
35:33And then they read the Chelsea Dockery count.
35:36The jury ultimately found Dr. Nichols guilty of one charge of second-degree murder.
35:51Chelsea is in her 20s.
35:52The other four charged individuals were a lot further along in life.
35:57And I think the jury felt more for Chelsea Dockery because of that.
36:02And since she was young, she got a full autopsy.
36:05And I think that also played a big part in the conviction of that particular count.
36:11The others didn't have a full autopsy, and they just relied on the toxicology.
36:17And we're talking about beyond a reasonable doubt.
36:19If you can say, well, you know, someone who's in their 50s or, you know, older,
36:24and you don't check their internal organs, you know,
36:27then you can kind of create some of that reasonable doubt there.
36:29So I can kind of understand that.
36:32I was relieved that we got justice for Chelsea Dockery.
36:40You see and feel how these people who have passed away,
36:44how it has affected their families in just so many different ways.
36:50And how it affects the people, their family members who are still here
36:54that may have introduced them to this doctor.
36:58The guilt that's laid on them.
37:02There's a reason why prosecutors fight for justice, for victims.
37:07And that is precisely it.
37:18Her defense attorney argued that she should be sentenced to probation,
37:22saying that she was no longer a danger to society
37:25and that she would be a law-abiding citizen.
37:27And, you know, the judge really looked and said,
37:31you know, I understand this is a physician
37:34and she has no criminal history, etc.
37:36But her behavior was egregious.
37:40And he ended up sentencing her to seven years.
37:45Reagan shows no remorse.
37:47She says herself that she cried at the deaths of every one of the patients,
37:52but makes the interesting statement that
37:54she can't keep crying for seven years.
37:58This strange statement just tells me that
38:02this is somebody who even now
38:03is refusing really to accept what they've done.
38:08And it's somebody who still is holding on
38:11to this sense of themselves
38:13as knowing what is best,
38:16what should be done,
38:17as their judgment.
38:20It takes me right back to the early days of somebody
38:23who lived in existence where
38:26she was free to do exactly as she wished
38:29and never really came across any limitations or restraint
38:33and became part of a very elite world
38:36that she was not open to question.
38:40Her judgment reigns supreme.
38:54Had she survived,
38:56her life would have been different.
38:59The opioid world is different now than it was when she was practicing.
39:03And it's very, very hard for doctors to practice anywhere near the level that she was.
39:11So it would have been very different.
39:13Even if she'd gotten out and she tried to practice,
39:15she would have faced so many different hurdles.
39:17She may not have gotten her medical license back.
39:20She would have had trouble getting credentialed by insurance companies.
39:23And really, the biggest thing is
39:25she would have had trouble getting people to trust her,
39:28to let her be their doctor again.
39:33When we run across these cases,
39:35it taints the profession
39:37because we start seeing doctors in a different kind of way.
39:41And that's unfortunate
39:42because it's always a very small number of doctors
39:45who engage in medical malpractice
39:47or who do things like this.
39:48But I think it does impact our perception.
39:53The flip side of that is, I think,
39:55being aware of doctors who either make mistakes
39:57or doctors who deliberately harm patients.
40:01I think there's been much more of a push for consumers
40:05to take responsibility for their medical care
40:08and to do their own research
40:09and get second opinions
40:11and those kinds of things.
40:13And I think that's the silver lining.
40:15Maybe that's come out of some of this.
40:18You know, 20 years ago,
40:20it was probably hard for you to know someone
40:22who had been touched by the opioid epidemic,
40:25who'd been affected.
40:26Now, here we are 20 years later
40:28with over a million individuals
40:30succumbed to opioid overdose death.
40:32A lot of these individuals died
40:34because they went to the doctor.
40:43She should have been the gatekeeper.
40:45She should have been the responsible one.
40:48There's something wrong with the world
40:50when your outcomes are worse
40:52when you go to the doctor.
40:55In a case like Dr. Nichols,
40:57where it was very obvious
40:59that she was way below the standard of care
41:02in doing dangerous and harmful prescribing,
41:06she's got a lot of responsibility.
41:08But that doesn't take away the responsibility
41:10from the opioid manufacturers
41:12who not only allowed,
41:14but also encouraged
41:15such careless prescribing of opioids.
41:19And had it not been for the manufacturers
41:22in their aggressive, unbranded marketing campaign,
41:25then Dr. Nichols may not have ever happened.
41:30I think that what allowed her
41:33to progress into becoming somebody
41:36who could be so dangerous
41:38wasn't greed, wasn't money.
41:41It was actually an absolute sense of pride.
41:46It was a complete refusal to accept
41:49that she was making mistakes.
41:52It was a complete refusal to understand
41:55that her judgment, her way of thinking,
41:58her way of operating was not appropriate.
42:02She was somebody who had been brought up
42:05in an unquestioning, limitless way,
42:08without boundaries,
42:10without much monitoring,
42:11a part of a big family.
42:13And when faced with this dilemma
42:15as a lone physician,
42:16she believed she knew better.
42:19So ultimately,
42:21it was her refusal to admit to her mistakes,
42:24gradually, over time,
42:26this enormous sense of stubborn pride
42:29that turned this wholesome all-American girl
42:33into a murderer.
42:56You know that I went to find some things
43:12it was for you all.
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