Appeal: This website is becoming expensive to maintain and since my financial situation has gotten a whole lot worse recently I would very much like to ask for a small crypto coin donation if you have the means to do so. I believe the truth must never be extinguished and that evil people must be held accountable no matter how powerful they are.
Bitcoin wallet address: bc1qeensqvvgw92rdt7wwkevf3kpkzl9f97uyl9au4
Etherium wallet address: 0xd1fdaa82d3b958e4dda4d3cf813506fd46e9887a
Fetch.ai wallet address: 0xa0E9F5D0b16405004be717e148bc2d4f147b4919
It’s been ten long years since my complete obliteration at the hands of the University of Melbourne Medical “faculty”. If truth be told, it has been extraordinarily difficult to recover from their sadistic extortion scheme that wiped me out financially and professionally. I have tried to publish my story in the main stream media but after awhile it became obvious that name brands protect name brands. I was able to publish my story in an independent Australian outlet and a US medical journal but none of those publications allowed to me to publish any names involved in my demise. This will change right here and right now.
A Brief Background
I came to Australia to undertake a PhD. in 2002 at Monash University. I have recently completed a Masters Degree in Physiology/Neuroscience concentrating on mechanisms of epilepsy and while on a trip to Melbourne, Australia to visit some relatives I contacted some people at Monash University to see if they had any interesting projects in the field of epilepsy and they did. I was able to obtain a modest PhD. scholarship but the idea of living and studying in a new place was extraordinarily appealing to me so I took the offer.
To make a long story short, I was able to complete my PhD. research and discovered some very interesting results that shed light on a novel mutation that supposedly caused a form of human epilepsy.
My experience in Australia while a PhD. student was absolutely phenomenal. I made a lot of good friends, was extraordinarily close to my PhD supervisor and life was generally good. I grew to really like Melbourne. I then made a decision that I wanted to attend medical school in Melbourne University Medical School as an international student. This was a very expensive endeavor at around U$320,000(including cost of living) but I thought that with US student loans and a little bit of money that I have saved up, this would be possible. I figured that since the first portion of my Aussie experience was good, what could possibly go wrong?
Stutter
Just to introduce a bit of a backstory, all of my life I’ve been suffering from a bit of a speech stutter. Usually this speech impediment resolves itself by adulthood but in rare cases it persists, I’m the rare case. I never felt any kind of shame or had any fear of public speaking because of the stutter but found that people were petrified of my stutter, almost like it was contagious. I can’t really say that I was ever seriously bullied because of my stutter, but I was ostracized by most people. I never really got depressed over it as that was just the way it was.
Story Part 1., Preclinical Years
This course was a little odd but from my perspective but this was a means to an end so I just went along with whatever they said. The course didn’t have any set subjects like you would have in a normal medical school. The course was divided into semesters which had titles like the “digestive system” which covered the abdomen with all the paired and unpaired viscera. This included random lectures on anatomy, histology, pharmacology and pathology. Usually medical schools break up all of these topics into individual subjects but this medical school seemed to have one continuous lecture that had little to no structure. It was odd, but I didn’t really question it. After two years of this I was finally able to advance to the clinical school at St. Vincents Hospital where all the “fun” started.
Story Part 2., St. Vincent’s Clinical School Years
Just to start off with, the St. Vincent’s Clinical School was actually very good. All the clinicians, surgeons and nurses I came into contact with were first class people and I have nothing bad to say about any of them. The clinicians I came into contact with were eager to teach, the patients I dealt with were always the sweetest people and I never once, NOT ONCE, got any flack for my stutter from a single patient or clinician, EVER.
Unfortunately I cannot say the same thing about the Dean of the clinical school, Associate Professor Wilma Beswick. From the first time I encountered this person, she went out of her way to be hostile and insulting to me every chance she got. She sat me down with her staff and repeatedly told be about how offensive my speech is and how I really do not belong in Australian Medicine. As clinical students we had to perform something called long cases. Long cases consisted of a student clerking a patient on the ward, taking a history and conducting a short physical examination. These results were then presented to faculty members for assessment. Every time I presented any of these cases to ANYONE else at St. Vincents I got some constructive criticism but all in all the feedback was good. With Wilma Beswick I was constantly berated and told that I would never pass the end of the year exams. Things got so bad that I actually took a synopsis of one of my cases and gave them to another student to present to Beswick, to no one’s surprise Beswick gave that student raving reviews.
The bullying from Wilma Beswick got so intense that I actually decided to take a year off after the first semester at clinical school and go back home to US and work for a bit and try to destress. I got a post-doc position at Harvard University and actually was able to perform some productive work.
I pondered long and hard as to whether to go back to Melbourne to continue with the clinical school and finally decided to give it another try. Big mistake!! Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu once stated that if someone threatens you, believe them! This is a lesson I came to learn the hard way.
When I came back to St. Vincent’s clinical school, the bullying from Wilma Beswick became even more intense. She finally sat me down and told me that I absolutely have to petition the faculty for more time on the oral OSCE exams because my stutter would impede me from finishing my OSCEs on time. This was really alarming because in the past semesters I never needed extra time to complete these OSCE exams. The fact that she was insisting I petition for extra time now raised a lot of red flags. Extra time implies that I don’t take these exams with the rest of the student population so it was possible that the exam questions I would be given would not correspond to what everyone else got. I will get back to this hypothesis later.
Story Part 3., Exams and their Consequences
So after another semester of bullying and harassment I finally got to the end of the year exams. These exams came with stipulations. The first stipulation was mentioned earlier, I had to petition for extra time which I got. The second stipulation was that I had to enroll in the stuttering clinic to completely cure my stutter before the exam. After two semesters of abuse I knew that these were not going to be normal exams, and I was proven right.
Just as a reminder, I sat the oral OSCE exams after the rest of the student body since I was forced to apply for extra time. The exams were strange to say the least. At one station I had to perform a mock venipuncture procedure on a plastic arm. When we practiced our venipuncture at the clinical school we always, always performed the procedure with vacutainer tubes. No vacutainer tubes were provided at this station and what I got instead was a set of 50 CC syringes with regular scientific test tubes. At this point I was panicking. Mock patients at other stations were just not answering any questions that I was asking them. At this point my life was flashing before my eyes, I was fucked and I knew it. To no one’s surprise I failed the end of the year exam and was told to immediately commence a repeat year for which I had to come up with an extra U$100,000 within 15 days. If that didn’t happen I would be given another year off to get myself “financially sorted”, but that in fact was tantamount to expulsion as no one would loan me another $100,000 and I would have to start making payments of over $4500/month on previous loans. The University knew this very well so it is difficult to believe that they wanted me to continue in this course.
I contacted the University to explain the direness of my situation but their response was very blunt, pay the fees and redo the year or leave, period. I finally requested a meeting with a senior authority figure and was told that I had to wait for 5 months as all the deans were extremely busy. After a lot of begging and pleading I was allowed to meet with the Dean of Medical Education Geoff McColl. As I knew at this point that I was being railroaded, I decided to record our encounter on a cheap MP3 player (perfectly legal under Australian law). Geoff McColl found my plight extraordinarily amusing as he was laughing and joking the entire time. After I brought up my concerns about the vacutainer portion of the exam, McColl responded by saying that the tubes were “always an issue” with this station but the examiner corrected for the mishap and that I actually passed that portion of the exam(we’ll get back to this later). Going through the rest of my exam sheets(which only he saw) he began making very creepy comments that some examiners thought that my stutter was actually an “attribute”. His behavior was so unsettling that I honestly thought he was high on something. He told me to write a groveling letter to the Medical School dean begging for some sort of fee relief while seconds later saying that I would probably receive nothing due to the “financial climate” the university was experiencing. He then said that he believed that I did have the money for three more semesters and that after I run out of money the world would become a “better place” and I “will get all the loans I want”.
It was obvious at this point that this man was not playing with a full deck and that I was in serious trouble. Given the reality of coming up with an extra $100,000 within 15 days or be booted from the country, I instantly hired a lawyer to take some control of the situation. The first thing we did was to file a freedom of information act to obtain copies of the OSCE marking sheets. What the marking sheets revealed was absolutely shocking.
Story Part 4., Marking Sheets
Vacutainer Station
During my meeting with McColl, I brought up my concern that I was not provided with vacutainer tubes for the blood drawing station. He confidently responded that the examiner made up for that mishap and that I actually passed that station so there were no issues. This was an obvious lie as I failed the station with the exam sheet clearly showing that the examiner made no effort to compensate me for missing vacutainer tubes and also had the audacity to write that I was “not familiar with vacutainer tubes”. The only thing we ever practiced venipuncture with was vacutainer tubes. During the clinical year we must’ve practiced that technique dozens of times. Another interesting thing to notice about this station is that despite the examiner not providing me with the correct tubes I was still able to improvise and get most of the points for the technique. What’s interesting is that there is a section on the marking sheet which allows for the examiner to give you 5 points based strictly on his subjective discretion(eg. technical skills). Of course I got the minimum amount of points on this part because of me choosing incorrect tubes because the correct ones weren’t even made available to me.
Diabetes Complication
The exam station started with a simple blood pressure examination which I only got 1 out of 6 points on. Notice that the examiner circled two correct actions but I only got credit for one, but I will get back to this portion of the station much later.
What is really telling and bizarre about this station is the Assesses feet portion of the station. Notice that I got only 2 out of 10 marks for the examination portion of the station. The examiner only gave me points for Spends adequate time at both feet and for some bizarre reason gave me two more mysterious points overall. Once again this is more evidence that points are assigned out of the blue in this course and are not necessarily awarded for the correct answers. What really is off-putting here is that the examiner gave me almost full-credit for examination findings on the Examiner Question portions in the end of the marking sheet, these were my clinical examination findings.
How is it possible to get all the examination findings correct without actually doing the examination properly thereby failing the exam? Am still scratching my head.
Dysphagia Interview
The most flagrant example of how I got purposely railroaded in these examinations comes from this exam station. In this course we’re taught that all exam questions would be based on the practice PBLs that were in our clinical instruction manuals. This was the particular PBL for dysphagia. During the first two parts of the exam station I was supposed to ask detailed questions like whether there is nasal regurgitation and what is the timing with respect to swallowing. All these questions are rather irrelevant and have no bearing on the diagnosis and what’s worse is they are not mentioned in the PBL. But these questions were worth around 7% of the whole station. What gets even more stupid is then I am not given credit for asking about associated coughing but am given credit for asking whether the patient is coughing up blood(hemoptysis)!! Huh??? So I ask the patient about whether he coughed up blood but somehow glossed over the question of whether the patient has an associated cough? I was also supposed to ask if the patient had a previous endoscopy. Well if the patient is just presenting with the symptoms why the hell would he have a previous endoscopy?
What was really shocking about this station is the following. In the PBL it CLEARLY states that a barium swallow procedure should be performed first to determine the level of obstruction. This is an absolute given in all swallowing abnormalities. The exam that was given to me did NOT contain this procedure as the right answer. I was given credit for saying “barium swallow” but it was deemed an incorrect answer. WOW!!! I do not want anyone to tell me that this was an accident or an oversight, this was done intentionally. To add insult to injury I was also supposed to be shown an image of an endoscopy picture so I could make a diagnosis, guess what, no picture was provided. Not only did they have the gall not to provide me with this image but they also brazenly wrote on the exam paper that they refused to provide me with the endoscopy picture. Has anyone ever heard of a major university doing this???
Suffice to say that I failed the station and the instructor also noted that I had a severe stutter. Nice, ain’t it.
Story Part 4., Repercussions
To say that the repercussions for me were ghastly would be an understatement. When I presented all the evidence of my being intentionally failed to the medical faculty including the audio recording of my conversation with Geoff McColl where he lies and berates me I thought I was going to get a fair hearing, Wrong!! What I got instead was a letter saying that if I ever made any of my evidence public I was going to face a two year jail sentence. Bear in mind that the recording I made was absolutely legal as I cleared it with my lawyer and his expert consultant barristers.
So after almost a full decade of living and studying in Melbourne I had to leave with my tail between by legs, deep in crippling debt, no degree and the complete destruction of any sort of career, be it medical or research.
Story Part 5., Melbourne University Finally Responds and it ain’t pretty
After ten years of silence I was finally able to get Melbourne University to respond to my complaints through an intermediary. The Melbourne University administrator who was finally able to interact with me was the newly minted Head of the Melbourne Medical School Steve Trumble. Now I laid out the same case as I did on this website and got this bizarre letter in response. In this letter he stated that he saw nothing wrong with any of the inconsistancies on the marking portion of the exam. He saw nothing wrong with me not being given credit for right answers or me not being provided with key imaging pictures on the exams. He wrote things like:
As explained above, there were no marks available for estimating it(blood pressure) by auscultation, as this is a poor discriminator of performance.
Yup, using auscultation to measure blood pressure is wrong. This is not a joke, he actually said this.
So if you glance at the exam station again, he is absolutely right. There are no correct marks for auscultating blood pressure. According to this actual exam sheet, you need to palpate the radial pulse to estimate blood pressure. How you can carefully gauge the diastolic reading using this technique is beyond me. I have never seen or heard of anything like this.
When I brought up the fact that one does not need to auscultate to score full marks on this exam sheet I got the following response:
A candidate who didn’t auscultate for the Korotkoff sounds would be marked right down for global technique. It would be a very rare candidate who didn’t auscultate, as they would be clearly incompetent.
This is once again a complete lie as there is nothing on the marking sheet backing any of Steve Trumble’s assertions. There is simply NOTHING in the marking sheet remotely hinting that auscultation should be used for blood pressure measurement. So yes, palpating the radial artery for blood pressure measurement was what the University prescribed no matter how much they try to deny it. The University instructions on how to measure blood pressure are supposedly reproduced from the recommendations of the Australian Heart Foundation. Except for one little thing, the Australian Heart Foundation site instructs you to perform auscultation over the brachial artery while the University omits this little detail. When I pointed this out to Steve Trumble instead of issuing an apology, he doubled down on the arrogance by claiming that he saw nothing wrong with the omission and that at the end of the day the University’s instructions were as he put it “congruent”.
As for the diabetes exam station he then goes on to say:
I note that the examiner gave you marks for the responses you gave to the questions at the end of the examination, despite your pulse palpation and sensory testing techniques having scored poorly. This is sometimes a problem with the ‘check box’ nature of older OSCE exams, with points being given for the provision of the correct information even when erroneously derived.
So let me get this straight, I arrived at the right conclusions by doing the exam erroneously?? If my pulse palpation and sensory testing is poor, how can you arrive at the right conclusion? If you think this flies in the face of common sense, it does. But this just goes to show that this University will do or say anything no matter how stupid they sound.
Steve Trumble wrote:
I remain concerned that you appear not to understand the OSCE technique and are also accusing us of errors that were not committed. The course is not riddled with massive deficiencies, as you attest.
When I finally forced him to see all the massive deficiencies he at first denied, this was the response that I got from him:
If a resource was not provided in an OSCE due to an administrative error – and it seems that was the case – than that is indeed a mistake and I’m sorry it occurred. These procedural errors occasionally occur in the 5,250 OSCE stations we deliver to our medical students each year. Our approach is to exclude those missed marks from the overall tally. So if the response was worth up to 2 marks, that station should be scored out of 38 rather than 40. It rarely makes a pass/fail difference but it’s fair.
The “mistakes” cost me a lot more than two points, none of them were ever corrected and it made all the difference in the world to my passing or failing. This was the end of my rather disgusting exchange with him and he ended the correspondence with a simple:
I’ll need to move on
Story Part 6., Conclusion
What makes this whole thing very evil is that it is obvious that this University had no intention of allowing me to ever graduate from this course. They could’ve just sat me down and told me that I am not welcomed at their institution and given me my money back. That would’ve at least shown some humanity. These people wanted to see me completely and utterly devastated both professionally and financially so that’s exactly what they set out to do. The saddest thing is garbage like this not only thrives but is actively protected by a most despicable culture.
Story Part 7., Update(03/13/2021)
It has recently become clear that Geoff McColl is at it again, except this time he is extorting American students in a much more grandiose manner. It has come to my attention that as the executive dean of the UQ/Oschner medical student program he is holding back a significant number of American medical students for one whole year using similar cynical tactics. A few brave UQ/Oschner students were able to anonymously give details of the madness that he is unleashing on them. In one instance his administration informed students that due to the COVID-19 pandemic they were allowed to go back to the US and finish the remainder of the semester remotely. When all these students arrived back home they were subsequently informed that the university changed their minds and that these students would have to come back to Australia and repeat the entire year at their own expense. Another group of US students were made to sit a USMLE Part 1 mock exam that was previously used as an aid to help them prepare for the real Step 1 but all of a sudden was made a hurdle requirement for the passing of the entire semester. So just to put this in perspective, these students passed all the same exams as the Australian domestic students(who the US students completely subsidize financially) and were made to sit an exam whose content the UQ course didn’t even cover. A significant number of students(around 20%) failed this exam and were told that they would have to repeat the whole year at their expense just to resit this mock exam. These students are not even eligible to take the real USMLE Step 1 until they pass this UQ mock exam(a practice unheard of in any US medical school). The Australian students were spared from this hurdle and are now in clinical school in Australia and are eligible to sit the USMLE step 1 if they so chose. Needless to say these US students are currently in a very dire situation having their medical school transcripts irreversibly tainted. I hope everyone who reads this grasps the extent of the treachery that Australia’s so-called tertiary educators are unleashing on its international students. Thankfully China has already called for a full boycott of Australian Universities and hopefully many other countries are going to follow.