Being patient paid off for fraud

Press, 17 April 1979, Page 9

Being patient paid off for fraud

NZPA-Reuter London Stewart Mcllroy, an Irishman who made a career out of getting hospital care for non-existent ailments, may have cost the “British Medical Jourhealth services as much as S2M. Mcllroy, last heard of a year ago and now presumably dead, was admitted as ’ a patient 207 times, and perhaps more often, to at least 68 hospitals in Britain and Ireland, according to tabulations covering half a page of the Ish Medical Journal.” He certainly spent well over 10 years in hospitals, and probably was also in hospitals during 10 to 20 years more, the incomplete records indicate. Yet, apart from a fractured femur and possibly an occasion when he was

treated for retention of urine, “Mcllroy’s symptoms were fraudulent,” according to Dr Christopher Pallis, a neurological specialist at Hammersmith Hospital, London, and Dr Andrew A. N. Bamji, senior registrar in the department of rheumatology at Middlesex Hospital, London. They claimed in the “British Medical Journal’’ that their “persistent inquiries, now spreading over several years” make Mcllroy “the longest fol-lowed-up patient with Munchausen’s syndrome.” Munchausen’s syndrome is named after the amusing but untruthful 18thcentury stories known as the adventures of Baron Munchausen, Mcllroy went so far as to help the doctors find the “relevant” physical

signs they were seeking. Explaining his ability to do this, Drs Pallis and Bamji wrote: “As befits someone with such a wide hospital experience — and who had been taught on so many times — Mcllroy had acquired a remarkable grasp of medical terminology.” Mcllroy, whose decade or more in hospitals kept him clear of the troubles of the outside world and ensured he was well fed and warmly housed, seemingly was born in County Donegal, the northernmost county of the Irish Republic. He was fond of recounting that all his relatives had met violent deaths at the hands of “bombers and gunmen” of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, whose activities are another story.

His saga of symptoms seemingly began at City Hospital, Belfast, in the British province of Northern Ireland, when he was admitted several times with a knee injury in 1944. Three years later, as “Convict Mcllroy,” he was transferred from Belfast Prison to an Ulster psychiatric hospital, where he spent five years. The year 1954 found him at London’s Charing Cross Hospital, where he was admitted with a left penumothorax (accumulation of air in the pleural cavity of the lungs). As he went from hospital to hospital, using at least 22 different surnames and eight first names, he would tell of recurrent headaches, stiff neck, hemiplegia (paralysis), photophobia (abnor-

mal intolerance of light), and haemorrhaging (bleeding). He would ring the changes with complaints of nerve disorders, dysphagia (difficulty in swallowing), dysphonia (difficulty in speaking), and respiratory trouble (for which he endured a tracheotomy — the insertion of a tube through the neck to facilitate the passage of air to the lungs). “His scarred abdomen meanwhile remained a momument to current investigative enthusiasms, if not to modern powers of discrimination ” Drs Pallis and Bamji wrote. The full cost to the British and Irish taxpayers must run into six, possibly seven figures, they said, adding: “Quite apart from bed and board, he cost the

taxpayer dear in investigations and operative procedures (surgery) . . . His numerous scars bore witness to laparotomies (abdominal surgery) and orthopedic procedures (relating to bones and joints) the details of which are unknown to us “He underwent at least 48 lumbar punctures . . . the number of ordinary X-ray examinations and blood tests must run into hundreds if not thousands. “His survival story bears testimony to the resilience of the human frame and to the relative safety of our hospitals. “Stewart Mcllroy taught many lessons to those who were deceived, not least being the lesson that we are not always the astute physicians we would like to believe.”