Gerald Nielson’s back pain has plagued him ever since the day in 1986 when he crashed his Trans Am while going 80 miles an hour. The accident broke his back in several places and left him with a constant, searing ache from his neck to his tailbone. The accident didn’t diminish his love of cars, though. He spent his life as a salesman, buying and flipping old Corvettes and Benzes from his home in Bluff Springs.
The pain grew less tolerable as Nielson entered his 40s, and in 2011, he asked his primary care doctor for help. The doctor referred him to Philip Leonard, a neurologist in central Austin. Nielson was in luck: Leonard was able to see him right away.
Nielson’s first few visits to Leonard, who was then 60, were unremarkable. Nielson had already been prescribed some risky medications: the opioid hydrocodone, the tranquilizer lorazepam, and the quasi-narcotic tramadol. Nielson begged Leonard for even better relief of his back pain, and Leonard gradually upped his medications, increasing Nielson’s hydrocodone dosage and later adding to his regimen the highly addictive drug oxycodone.
Drugs like oxycodone and hydrocodone have sparked an epidemic of opioid abuse, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives in recent years. They’re especially dangerous when combined with other medications. But in Nielson’s case, in the short term, the pills worked, and his pain went away. Early on, Nielson noticed that Leonard’s practice didn’t accept female patients, but he didn’t think much of it.
Nielson gradually became hooked on the medications, and his craving for them brought him back to Leonard’s office monthly for four years. Nielson says that over the years, Leonard began fondling him, eventually doing so at every visit. Leonard would bend Nielson over his exam table and grind against him. Over the course of several appointments, Leonard would touch his anus and his penis, Nielson says. At first, he used gloves. Then he stopped using them.
Nielson’s story is an extreme example of a disturbing power dynamic that has played out across the country, as more than 40 medical providers have been accused of coercing their patients for sex in exchange for addictive drugs in the past five years. Patients return to doctors who hurt
