Autism, hyperactivity, homeopathy and sexology from one office: the Hammam-Sousse 'psychiatrist' who was not on the Order's register, August 2024

Tunisia's Conseil national de l'Ordre des médecins keeps the register of doctors, and only the holder of a recognised medical diploma can be entered on it. The Sousse courts handled a case in August 2024 that shows how far a practice can get without ever touching that register.

According to Kapitalis, the deputy prosecutor and spokesperson of the Sousse 2 Court of First Instance, Hajer Aich, told the TAP news agency that a man had opened a medical office in Hammam-Sousse where he presented himself as a psychiatrist specialising in autism, childhood hyperactivity, homeopathy and sexology, and issued medical certificates under his name and those claimed specialities. Réalités reported that the investigation was led by the National Guard's judicial investigations unit in Sousse, that he had simply been practising before he was unmasked, and that officers made a descent on the office. Kapitalis reported that checks showed he was not registered with the Ordre des médecins and held no recognised diploma qualifying him to practise medicine; Réalités quoted a representative of the Order as confirming that he was 'bel et bien un faux praticien', a genuine fake practitioner, without the slightest qualification in the specialities he advertised.

The prosecutor issued a detention order on Tuesday 20 August 2024 and the case was sent to the correctional chamber the next day on a charge of illegal practice of medicine, Kapitalis reported. Between them the two reports list the items seized as cash collected from patients, medical certificates, medical equipment and supplies, registers and patient files. Neither outlet names the suspect or gives his age, and neither reports the eventual sentence.

The mechanism was speciality inflation. A single practitioner offering psychiatry, child neurodevelopment, homeopathy, couple therapy and sex therapy from one office would be unusual for a real doctor, who is registered in one speciality after a defined training path. Here the breadth itself was the offer, and the specialities claimed are ones that draw people who rarely ask for proof: parents of autistic and hyperactive children, who are often desperate and poorly served, and couples looking for discreet help. The certificates he issued carried his name and his invented specialities, and the practice ran until the National Guard arrived rather than until a patient queried his credentials.

For families the lesson is that any practitioner, however many specialities are painted on the door, can be looked up with the Ordre des médecins, and that a child's developmental diagnosis should come from a registered paediatrician or child psychiatrist. For students, the case shows what registration is for: the Order's representative could say in one sentence that this man was not a doctor because the register is the only list that counts, and a diploma that is not on it, real or invented, confers nothing.