Grey’s Anatomy season 14 featured a storyline where a doctor wrongly diagnosed various patients with cancer, and this was based on a true story – here’s what happened. Grey’s Anatomy has become one of the most popular medical dramas in recent years and shows no signs of stopping soon, even if some viewers feel it’s already past its prime. The series, created by Shonda Rhimes, premiered on ABC in 2005 and has since seen the departure of most of its original cast, but it continues to find a lot of stories to tell.
Like any other medical drama, Grey’s Anatomy follows the lives of surgical interns, residents, and attendings as they do their best to juggle their professional and personal lives, which often overlap and make way for a lot of drama both inside and outside the hospital. The series is led by Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), who started as an intern and is now Head of General Surgery at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, and through her, viewers have met a variety of characters, each one dealing with their own personal and professional issues. Among those is Arizona Robbins (Jessica Capshaw), an attending fetal and pediatric surgeon who is one of the “Seattle Grace Five” and who was also involved in a storyline about a fake cancer clinic that is actually based on true events.
In Grey’s Anatomy season 14 episode “Out of Nowhere”, Arizona met Dayna Rutledge (Nina Millin) and Peggy Knox (Annie Sertich), who arrived at the hospital as Peggy panicked during a home water birth, and she was already in advanced labor. Dayna and Peggy returned many episodes later, specifically in the episode “Hold Back the River”, after Dayna vomited while they were driving and they crashed into a tree. Dayna revealed she was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer and had just had her second round of chemo, which is why she got sick.
She later shared that her doctor, Scott Hanson (Hal Sparks), had told her she would feel sick and that his success rates were amazing, which made Dr. Owen Hunt (Kevin McKidd) grow suspicious about this so-called marvelous doctor. After doing a CT scan on her which revealed no evidence of cancer, Owen and Arizona’s suspicions only grew, so the latter made a fake appointment with Dr. Hanson, who found “a solid lesion” in her left breast, shocking Arizona and Owen. They returned to Grey Sloan Hospital and had April finish up her ultrasound which came out clean, proving that Dr. Hanson had been faking ultrasound images and giving chemotherapy to patients that didn’t need it at all.
This story was based on the real-life case of Farid T. Fata, a Lebanese hematologist/oncologist who owned Michigan Hematology-Oncology, one of the largest cancer practices in Michigan. He specialized in treating blood cancer and owned his own lab, pharmacy, and radiation treatment facility, and acquired a reputation as one of the best cancer specialists in Metro Detroit, though he was also known for his aggressive approach, giving higher doses of chemo more frequently, which he called “European protocol”. It was later discovered that Fata was giving wrong diagnoses to his patients along with really aggressive chemotherapy in order to bill their insurance for more money. In 2015, Fata was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison and pleaded guilty to charges of health care fraud, conspiracy to pay and receive kickbacks, and money laundering.
Back to Grey’s Anatomy, Scott Hanson was also arrested, but not before Owen confronted him. In the same episode where they discovered his lies, Owen arrived at the clinic as Hanson was closing up and forced him to sit in his chair. Owen then prepared a needle with chemo fluid and threatened to inject Hanson, telling him not to worry as he was with him, something Hanson told his patients. The police then arrived at the clinic, and Owen let them handle the situation. This is not the first time Grey’s Anatomy takes inspiration from real-life events, and this was certainly one scandalous and dark story.