A table, a chair and no equipment: the Hostomice practice near Teplice where a self-described fifth-year Yerevan medical student was accused of seeing patients under his father's stamp

Small towns in the Czech Republic struggle to recruit general practitioners, and Hostomice, near Teplice in the Ústí nad Labem region, had been looking for one for a long time, according to its mayor. In August 2025 the practice it eventually found became a police matter, and the man at the centre of it said he was a medical student at a university in Yerevan, Armenia, which is why the case matters to anyone studying medicine abroad.

According to CNN Prima News, reporting on 9 August 2025, several viewers contacted its crime desk to say a fake doctor was practising in Hostomice; for months locals had heard that a son without medical training was seeing patients under his father's name and using his stamp. A woman who went to register as a patient said the doctor had only a desk and a chair and no equipment. Mayor Ivan Holata told CNN Prima that a doctor, a nurse and a young medical student had turned up wanting to take over the practice, which had reportedly been running for two years. "We probably got fooled," he said. Blesk, citing CNN Prima the same day, reported residents' claims that the young man examined patients and issued prescriptions and sick notes while a doctor was nominally in charge, and that some patients saw only basic equipment in the surgery.

The young man told CNN Prima that he was a fifth-year medical student at a university in Yerevan, that he had only helped his father, the practising doctor, by sending prescriptions and preparing documents, that he never worked without his father present, and that he had never told anyone he was a doctor or held a specialist qualification. Police spokeswoman Ilona Gazdošová said officers would deal with the case on the basis of the information gathered. The Czech Medical Chamber's spokesman, Michal Sojka, told CNN Prima that a medical student cannot run a surgery or sign sick notes and prescriptions, even under the guarantee of a qualified doctor; Blesk reported the chamber's position in the same terms. CNN Prima found the practice closed, with a notice saying the doctor was on holiday until mid-August, and a new doctor reportedly due to start the following week.

The gap was supervision. A town that badly wanted a doctor accepted a practice and, on the mayor's own account, did not establish who would actually be in the consulting room. If residents' accounts are right, prescriptions and sick notes carried a real doctor's name and stamp, so pharmacies and employers had no reason to question them; it was patients who noticed the near-empty surgery first. When the case was reported, police had only said they would look into it and nobody had been charged, which is why the young man is not named here.

For the many South Asian and African students at universities in Yerevan, Tbilisi or Kyiv, the lesson is blunt: a student is not a doctor in any country, and "helping out" in a relative's practice with prescriptions and paperwork can end a career before it begins, even without ever claiming a qualification. For patients, compare the name on the prescription with the person who examined you, and check that name in the Czech Medical Chamber's register of doctors.