Long Island Spine Surgeon Faces Allegations of Falsifying Surgical Reports, Putting Patients at Risk

A Long Island orthopedic spine surgeon is under fire after court filings alleged he “copied and pasted” language from dozens of surgical reports for unrelated patients, raising questions about medical fraud and patient safety. Newsday had the story.

Dr. Alexios Apazidis, a Harvard-educated surgeon now with Total Spine and Sports Care, is accused of reusing “more than 800 words of highly technical language” in reports for 24 different spinal surgeries performed between 2020 and 2024. The surgeries were tied to personal injury cases involving workplace, home, and motor vehicle accidents.

“It is alleged that Apazidis knowingly and falsely manufactured the contents of the operative reports.” “He did so knowing that some would be used in litigation”… “as a necessary step in his scheme and artifice to defraud.”

The complaint, filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court, asks a judge to refer the matter to the New York Office of Professional Medical Conduct to determine whether his license should be suspended. Independent medical reviews have also challenged the necessity of several procedures.

“The public has a right to expect that physicians who generate sworn operative reports for use in court do so based on individualized patient care, not on pre-written templates detached from clinical reality.”

This is not Apazidis’s first run-in with regulators. In 2015, he admitted to “negligence” and “incompetence” for improperly prescribing ketamine-based gel and oxycodone without proper evaluations, resulting in a $50,000 fine and probation, and a license suspension for 36 month suspension.

Instances like this reveal a deficiency in our legal and medical oversight frameworks. When a doctor can purportedly reuse surgical reports for years — even following previous disciplinary measures — and still impact critical personal injury cases, there is a fundamental flaw in the system.  

Patients trust their doctors to provide personalized, expert care, especially when it comes to life-altering procedures like spinal surgeries. But when doctors allegedly reuse copy-pasted reports for multiple unrelated patients, it not only undermines the integrity of medical practice, but also jeopardizes patient safety and the fairness of legal proceedings tied to personal injury cases.

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