(WHAS11) - The New Albany clinic is one of three clinics owned by Dr. Tiwari, the other two are located in Bloomington and Indianapolis.
In addition to the federal charges filed against the owner, he has also been the target of two complaints by the Indiana board of medical licensure. One was filed just a little more than a month ago.
The list of patients receiving care at Dr. Kamal Tiwari’s clinics is long.
The amount of money the clinics bring in is huge, more than $21 million in the last five years.
But a federal criminal complaint says many of the patients received substandard or even dangerous care at the clinics and taxpayers and insurance companies were ripped off.
According to investigators, five of Dr. Tiwari's patients died from drug overdoses and another was caught diverting and selling prescriptions.
And prosecutors say patients were forced to undergo painful medical procedures like trigger point injections and epidurals in exchange for narcotics prescriptions.
All so Tiwari could maximize his income.
While the criminal complaint involved patients at the doctor's clinic in Bloomington, several patients told us they had a similar experience at this clinic in New Albany.
“It looked like a back alley abortion clinic. It’s dirty in there. It’s filthy in there” said patient Kathy Lyles.
Lyles started going to the clinic several years ago for chronic back pain.
She said she had to get frequent x-rays and cat-scans.
The only treatment she says she received was through increasingly high doses of Oxycontin, Norco and other narcotics.
The 45-year-old eventually ended up addicted to pain killers in a nursing home.
When she signed herself out of the nursing home, she was taking 50 some pills a day.
“I was about dead when I got out of there. And if I hadn't signed myself out, I wouldn't be sitting here right now,” she said.
Lyles, who is on Medicaid, says she questioned the frequent tests.
One man's relative also was a clinic patient after a car crash.
“She would be non functional. She wouldn't know us. She’d be mumbling and she'd be incoherent,” he said of his relative.
WHAS11 talked to employees at the local clinic who didn't want to comment.
This was not the first time Dr. Tiwari has been disciplined by the Indiana Medical Board.
Back in 2007, he was cited for using disposable "one-time" syringes on multiple patients, risking possible contamination.
