Houston doctor who prescribed ivermectin to Fort Worth COVID patient faces discipline

The case of a Fort Worth patient’s quest to treat his COVID-19 with ivermectin, and a Houston doctor’s determination to prescribe him the drug, is headed to a rare hearing where a state agency will argue that the doctor broke the law.

The Texas Medical Board filed a formal complaint against Dr. Mary Talley Bowden in April, accusing her of unprofessional conduct when she allegedly prescribed ivermectin to a man at Texas Health Huguley Hospital where she did not have privileges. She also did not properly review the patient’s medical history or the patient himself, according to the complaint.

The dispute has garnered widespread attention because it involves ivermectin — a drug that prominent people, including former President Donald Trump, have incorrectly claimed as a COVID cure. The case also raises the question of whether patients have the right to request drugs with no proven benefit, and whether doctors can responsibly prescribe such drugs.

The Texas Medical Board, which is responsible for licensing the 70,000 doctors in Texas, is focusing solely on whether Bowden had the authority to practice medicine at Texas Health Huguley, and whether she knew enough about the patient to prescribe him anything.

“She did not conduct an exam, nor could she have done so, as she did not have privileges at the hospital where the patient was admitted,” the board’s complaint reads.

It’s rare for Medical Board cases to proceed to this stage. Most disciplinary cases — approximately 90% of them — are settled in closed-door meetings, according to data from the board. Bowden and her attorneys declined the opportunity to settle the case, and it is instead scheduled for a four-day administrative hearing in 2024. Bowden’s attorneys did not respond to emails asking for comment. In legal filings, Bowden has denied all allegations in the medical board’s complaint, and said the board failed to follow procedural rules in bringing the case.

Bowden identified the patient as former Tarrant County Sheriff’s Deputy Jason Jones, who was admitted to Texas Health Huguley Hospital in 2021 with COVID-19.

He died in April. The cause of death was not disclosed in his obituary.

He was admitted to the hospital’s 28-bed intensive care unit in October 2021. Jones’ wife sued the hospital in an attempt to grant Bowden temporary privileges so she could treat him.

Bowden, who works in the River Oaks neighborhood of Houston, attempted to get privileges at Huguley in November 2021 so she could treat Jones, according to the medical board’s complaint. Bowden withdrew her application for privileges on Nov. 5. Then, five days later, she emailed the hospital to supplement her application and said she planned to have a nurse under her supervision come to the hospital and administer the drug.

Hospital staff replied and said she had not completed her application and noted that she did not have privileges. Bowden responded via text and email that her nurse would be arriving in 30 minutes. At the same time, Bowden documented the situation on Twitter.

After Bowden’s nurse arrived, hospital staff ultimately called Fort Worth police because of the nurse’s “unauthorized presence.” The situation resulted in a “disruptive scene,” and Bowden used her Twitter account to send photos of hospital staff, according to the medical board’s complaint. The nurse was not identified in the hospital board’s complaint.

Since then, Bowden resigned her privileges from Houston Methodist Hospital after a committee began investigating her conduct. She later filed a lawsuit accusing Houston Methodist Hospital and its CEO of defamation; the lawsuit was dismissed earlier this year.

All doctors must apply to a certain hospital in order to be able to provide medical care there, said Kay Van Way, a medical malpractice lawyer and patient safety advocate in Dallas.

The privileging process at a hospital regulates not just whether a doctor can practice medicine on the grounds, but also what kind of work they are able to do there.

“A doctor can’t just walk in off the street. These are not hotels,” Van Way said.

How ivermectin became falsely touted as a treatment for COVID-19

Ivermectin plays a central role in the case because of the ongoing battle between those who insist it is an effective treatment for COVID-19 and the researchers who have proven that it’s not.

Ivermectin has been used for decades, primarily to treat tropical diseases in humans and in veterinary work, said Derek Lowe, a medicinal chemist who has worked on drug development for decades. The drug is best known for treating river blindness in humans, an infection that is spread when flies infected with parasites bite humans.

Whenever a new pathogen, like the coronavirus, emerges, drug researchers around the world begin screening drug compounds to see if any drug that has already been manufactured and approved could be used to treat the new disease, Lowe said.

Some initial reports showed that ivermectin could stop cell cultures in a petri dish from getting infected with the coronavirus, Lowe said. But unfortunately, the good news stopped there.

“The problem is that the ivermectin results were at unrealistically high concentrations,” Lowe said. “There are a lot of other things that will ‘work’ if you just take a gargantuan amount. But they’ll do a lot of other s–t too.”

The doses of ivermectin that were being used in cell cultures were much larger than the doses that were safely used to treat humans with river blindness, Lowe said. The concentrations were so high, he added, that it would probably have been impossible to reach the same concentrations in a human body as was being done in the petri dish.

At that point, most doctors moved on from ivermectin, recognizing that it wasn’t going to be effective at treating COVID-19. Additional clinical trials, including multiple trials done in humans, found the drug was ineffective, Lowe said. And the trials that did show promising results were not rigorous enough or big enough to prove a cause and effect, he added.

“People have unrealistic ideas of how medicine and research work,” Lowe said. “It’s really, really hard to find a drug.”

But other doctors remained committed to the idea that ivermectin could prevent or treat COVID-19, despite growing evidence to the contrary. Incorrect information spread by medical doctors has become a growing problem since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Federation of State Medical Boards, which found that two-thirds of state medical boards had seen an increase in complaints about disinformation since the start of the pandemic.