A Saint Joseph, Michigan podiatrist will forfeit his licenses after he pled no contest to charges of diverting opioids and insurance fraud.
Doctor Craig Sherwood will give up his medical license, his license to write prescriptions and will close his medical practice at the end of the year.
Sherwood pled no contest to five counts of diverting opioid and five counts of insurance fraud for writing prescriptions for family members that were not his patients, and charging them to insurance.
One of his patients reported him to the state police after he asked her to return unused opioids he prescribed.
“He would write prescriptions to her for controlled substances, I think hydrocodone or vicodin, and he would ask her to return anything that she did not use," Berrien County Prosecuting Attorney Michael Sepic said."And so after a few times of doing that, she thought something’s wrong here and she reported it.”
Sepic says he will not seek incarceration in the case.
“Because I knew as part of this agreement that he was giving up his license to write prescriptions and closing his medical practice, I agreed that he not suffer the penalties of incarceration at the time of his sentencing.”
Sepic says Sherwood will likely serve probation and may be sentenced to a drug treatment program. He’s scheduled to be sentenced December 11.
He says they are unsure if Sherwood was taking the pills himself or giving them to other people, but they know he wasn’t selling them.