A Lee County doctor has resigned from his practice days after admitting to defrauding the government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Federal court documents show Dr. Michael Frey of the Advanced Pain Management & Spine Specialists clinic on College Parkway agreed to plead guilty Friday to two counts of fraud.

Investigators said he received more than $470,000 in illegal kickbacks from representatives of two companies.

Those companies would then file fraudulent Medicare benefit claims, a scheme which lasted for up to six years.

Some of Frey’s former patients, like Jean Sundstrom, are now left scrambling to find a new doctor.

“The man has a demeanor that makes you feel like everything’s going to be OK,” she said. “I don’t see the man as fraudulent. I just don’t.”

In a statement, Dr. Frey’s former business partner said the illegal kickbacks were “concealed from other members of the practice.”

Frey faces up to 10 years in prison, but that could be reduced if he helps investigators prosecute anyone else involved in the same scheme.

Our calls to Frey’s attorney were not returned.

The full statement from Dr. Jonathan Daitch, Frey’s now-former business partner, is below:

“Advanced Pain Management & Spine Specialists would like our patients and the Southwest Florida community to know that we are committed to the highest standards of medical care for our patients and the highest ethical standards for our medical profession.

“The practice recently learned that one of our physicians, Dr. Michael Frey, entered into a plea agreement with the government alleging the unlawful payment of kickbacks to Dr. Frey for the prescription of certain medical products.

“These kickbacks were concealed from other members of the practice. Although the plea agreement alleged unlawful payments to Dr. Frey for the prescription of medical products, it is our understanding that all medical services conducted by Dr. Frey and all medical prescriptions ordered by Dr. Frey were medically necessary and provided or prescribed for the maximum medical benefit to the patient.

“While I’m saddened to learn of Dr. Frey’s actions, our primary responsibility is to our patients and staff.

“Dr. Frey has since resigned from Advanced Pain Management & Spine Specialists and I have assumed sole ownership over the practice.

“I have thoroughly reviewed our operations and have taken proactive measures to ensure that proper patient care and billing processes are being followed, including ongoing, robust compliance training for all staff and continuous audit procedures. I stand behind the superior patient care that the practice provides to patients. To that end, we have assembled a team of highly qualified physicians and staff to ensure the highest quality of ongoing care for our patients.

“We look forward to continuing to provide the specialized services to our patients and our community that can only be found at Advanced Pain.”

While it is not stated in this article… it sounds like a company called Insys Therapeutics that has a product called Subsys… which is a sublingual Fentanyl spray and is only approved for end stage cancer pain, because of this route of administration it has a short onset and short duration of action.  End stage cancer pain can be very abrupt and very severe and using this routine of administration the onset of action is fairly close to giving an injection.

Here is another article about this company and this product and the legal problems surrounding it 5 Doctors Are Charged With Taking Kickbacks for Fentanyl Prescriptions

Whether Dr Daitch was aware what his partner (Dr. Frey) was doing or not…. I would suspect that Dr Daitch’s practice  has found that he now has a lot of “alligators” in his swamp because of the actions of Dr Frey. On the website – as of today – shows Dr Daitch as the only physician in the practice, so now he has at least twice as many pts than he can handle and may find that he is going to have trouble finding another physician to come into his practice and will be glad if a fair number of the pts in the practice.. decide to go elsewhere.

From his letter, sounds like he is going to treat a lot existing pts as “addicts” recommending Buprenorphine as a substitute for opiates and he is blaming insurance/PBM’s for removing pts off various benzos. I suspect that those chronic pts who have been using Subsys will find they have better pain management off of that product because they have probably been on a very serious pain “roller coaster”.. maybe even having been routinely thrown into withdrawal because of the short duration of action of Subsys.

It will be interesting if some of these pts comes forward after their “weaning off” of opiates and put on Buprenorphine or CBD oil and see how their pain is being managed. I may be wrong, but those whose treatment has been the proper dosing of ER & IR opiates.. will not be a bunch of “happy campers” and there may be a few suicides because of unrelenting pain.