Patients witnessed ‘erratic’ behavior from SLO doctor — one said he was sexually assaulted
A San Luis Obispo doctor who had his medical license suspended amid accusations of inappropriate behavior has a history of behaving erratically and even sexually assaulted one patient, according to three people who spoke to The Tribune.
David Jackson Levin, 44, an ear, nose and throat doctor in San Luis Obispo, is no longer practicing, and his office is closed.
According to a suspension order from the California medical board, Levin’s license was suspended in interim on June 21 because he is “unable to practice medicine safely due to a mental condition.”
He also faces a lawsuit from a his former medical assistant, who accuses him of sexual harassment and doing meth in the office. Additionally, the lawsuit says he incorrectly performed medical procedures and took painkillers he was prescribing, among other allegations.
The lawsuit, which was filed in May, alleges sexual harassment, sexual battery, sex discrimination, retaliation, wrongful termination and violating whistleblower law.
In a separate lawsuit filed in May 2022, a former patient of Levin, Amy Lessi, said that he botched her nasal surgery, causing her to lose her sense of taste and smell.
Lessi filed a lawsuit against Levin and ENT Medical and Surgical Care, French Hospital Medical Center and an anesthesiologist for negligence, battery and loss of consortium in May 2022.
Lessi’s lawyer Tyler Saldo confirmed Levin is scheduled to go to trial in the malpractice case in April 2025.
In the meantime, other former patients of the doctor have come forward.
Three patients of Levin from San Luis Obispo reached out to The Tribune to share share their experiences with him.
The Tribune reached out to Levin for comment, but he declined to answer questions about his patients’ experiences.
Doctor was ‘always bizarre,’ SLO woman says
Fanny Arenas, 37, said she first went to see Levin in 2018.
At the time, Arenas was struggling with fluid buildup in her ears and wanted to get them unclogged.
Arenas had ear tubes put in by Levin, which help with draining liquid from her clogged ears.
Arenas said Levin told her that it “could cause permanent damage” to have the tubes in longer than two years. As a result, she said Levin removed the ear tubes by the end of 2019, which led to ear problems like pressure and pain from all the liquid trapped from her sinuses.
Arenas said that later, she went to an ENT doctor in Santa Maria who told her that it wasn’t damaging to have ear tubes in for two years and questioned why Levin took them out.
Arenas said she goes months at a time hearing out of only one ear or hearing as if she’s underwater. She said every time she has a cold or allergies, it’s “an absolute nightmare.”
Fanny Arenas was unhappy with her care as a patient of Dr. David Levin who’s medical license was recently suspended.
Last fall, Arenas got really sick and said she couldn’t hear anything. She tried calling an ENT group in Santa Maria, but their earliest appointment was this July. Arenas said she didn’t want to go back to Levin given the issues she had since first seeing him in 2018, but she was in severe pain and he was the only available appointment who didn’t require a referral and who took her insurance.
So in December, she went back to see the doctor. But during that visit, she said, he acted erratic, looked disheveled and talked very quickly.
“He was always bizarre from what I remember,” Arenas said. But this time, she said his hair “was kind of messed up” and his “shirt was kind of halfway tucked in.”
Arenas also said that Levin didn’t wear a mask during the visit. She said she used to work in dental offices, and it struck her as odd that she didn’t know if she “ever saw him open any sterilizing equipment.”
She said Levin prescribed her narcotics, which also struck her as strange since he had never done so in previous visits.
Arenas said Levin punctured both her eardrums and used a vacuum to remove liquid, only for her ears to revert back to being clogged within a day.
“I was just going in there basically to get tortured for something that was going to work for four hours, and that was it,” Arenas said.
As to why she kept seeing Levin, Arenas said she had no other option.
“Why did I keep going back to him?” Arenas asked. “Well, because he was the only one that could see me.”
Part of the problem for Arenas was that she needed a referral from a primary care provider to see many of the ENT doctors in the area, but she didn’t have a regular primary care physician. This was because her insurance changed when she switched jobs, so Arenas had to find another regular care provider.
The Tribune has heard from SLO County residents about the challenges around scheduling healthcare appointments, and oftentimes it can take months to years to see a provider.
The San Luis Obispo office of Dr. David Levin on Casa Street is closed with a notice on the door seen here on July 11, 2024. He had his license suspended on June 21, 2024. According to a lawsuit filed May 27, 2024, Levin allegedly did meth in the office and sexually harassed his lead medical assistant.
Wife of Levin’s patient describes doctor’s erratic behavior
Another SLO resident, Karen Morgan, who’s in her 70s, said she witnessed Levin behaving erratically when she accompanied her husband to four appointments with the doctor in April and May 2021.
Her husband, who was 78 at the time, had a small extrusion from his ear canal, and he was worried it was something serious.
“His behavior the whole time, including the first visit, was quite erratic,” Morgan said of Levin.
Similar to Arenas’ encounter, Morgan said that during a second visit in 2021, Levin didn’t wear a mask. This worried Morgan because it occurred during the COVID pandemic.
“He was doing things like poking around with a sponge, a little gauze pad,” Morgan said. “And then after he had dabbed it on my husband’s ear, which you know was by then bleeding some, he would toss it across the room onto a counter.”
Morgan said Levin prescribed her husband more antibiotics along with the powerful painkiller Oxycodone, which Morgan said her husband didn’t take.
Morgan said she also overheard Levin talking about sex acts with an employee in another room.
Morgan found out later that her husband had a low-grade skin problem as a result of sun damage. Over the course of the following two and a half months, Morgan said it turned into a more serious type of skin cancer.
In an email to The Tribune, Morgan said that during the last appointment with Levin on May 4, he recommended a biopsy at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center, but due to “his erratic and unprofessional behavior,” Morgan and her husband declined and switched to another specialist in the area.
Morgan said that the new doctor immediately referred her husband for surgery after seeing the tumor and how it had grown over the past few weeks.
On July 7, Morgan’s husband had a procedure at Stanford to move the tumor on his ear, which had grown to a bloody mass the size of a golf ball. His ear was completely removed, including his ear canal and left saliva gland.
When The Tribune asked what Morgan took away from all these experiences with Levin, she said she didn’t think Levin had any idea whether his methods worked.
“He had not done any biopsies, not even a needle biopsy,” Morgan said, which can help with diagnosing a medical condition, especially tumors or cancers. “He had no idea whether what he was prescribing would be effective.”
Now, after 30 radiotherapy treatments, two years of immunotherapy and a stroke that happened during surgery, Morgan said that her husband is cancer-free.
Morgan said she is not sure the “extent to which Dr. Levin’s negligence played a role in the outcome,” but she wanted to speak about their experience after seeing The Tribune’s story.
“I think physicians have a duty to care,” Morgan said. She added that she was bothered by “his persistent just lack of diagnosis and wanting to try to treat it with drugs,” Morgan said.
Morgan added that she didn’t know how Levin managed to stay in practice for so long.
The San Luis Obispo office of Dr. David Levin on Casa Street is closed with a notice on the door seen here on July 11, 2024. He had his license suspended on June 21, 2024. According to a lawsuit filed May 27, 2024, Levin allegedly did meth in the office and sexually harassed his lead medical assistant.
Patient says he was sexually assaulted by Levin in exam room
The final former patient who reached out to The Tribune accuses Levin of sexual assault.
This patient, who The Tribune is not naming because he’s the potential victim of a sex crime, said he saw Levin in 2016 in his former Templeton office where he sexually assaulted the patient.
The patient said he needed to see an ENT after taking an allergy medicine that left his throat agitated and hurting. The medicine, Flonase, was recalled in 2018 for potentially having glass particles in some of the bottles.
The patient went to see Levin because he said the doctor was the only ENT available in the area at the time.
During the exam, he said that as Levin leaned over to put a camera into his throat, he got “really, really close.”
He said that Levin rubbed up against him, touching his groin over his hospital gown.
“He was very flirtatious, really, really flirtatious,” the patient said. “He knew I had a learning disability, and then he kind of like rubbed on me, and then I pushed him off.”
The patient said after he pushed Levin off and asked him what he was doing, Levin went into a corner and paused.
“Then he just charged at me and told me to get out, and actually walked me out,” the patient said.
The patient said Levin treated him “like trash” before escorting him out of the building.
When one of his brothers mentioned The Tribune’s story about Levin, the patient said he felt like it was time to speak out.
“Now’s my chance to get my power back,” he said. “I didn’t want to see that man anymore because he shamed me so bad in Templeton.”
The patient said he did think about filing a lawsuit against Levin, adding he felt that he “wouldn’t have stood a chance” because of his learning disability and also because he felt so ashamed.
“I kind of have like a mean madness to this guy because of what he did to me and how he treated me when he kicked me out of the doctor’s office, because I wouldn’t let him touch me,” the man said.
SLO doctor’s license suspended for ‘mental condition.’ Lawsuit says he did meth in the office
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