A doctor denied inappropriately prescribing steroids and antibiotics with potentially serious side effects to an elderly flu patient when a Medical Council hearing into his conduct opened yesterday.
Dr Lee Chiu-tong, who did not have a lawyer and said he was bankrupt, denied professional misconduct and said he believed the patient had a fever, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He did not say how he diagnosed these.
Angel Yeung On-kei told the hearing Lee prescribed her father Yeung Wing-shek, 76, 12 drugs after a consultation in July 2008.
'There were several kinds of painkillers. I doubted whether he needed all those drugs,' Yeung said. She said she and her brother had stopped their father taking the drugs and asked him not to go to Lee's clinic again. 'It was for the benefit of others that I decided to file a complaint about Dr Lee,' she said
Lee rejected Yeung's comments. 'Do you think you are a doctor?' he asked. 'Your father was sick. Were you trying to murder him [by stopping him from taking the medicine]?'
But Dr Daniel Chu Wai-sing, head of family medicine and primary health care for public hospitals in the east of Hong Kong Island, said he saw no reason for the use of antibiotics and steroids in Yeung's case.