LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- A Louisville pain management doctor is facing federal charges and is suspended by the state medical board. Now, his patients are voicing concerns about what their future looks like having to go without pain medicine.

The pain is different for everyone.

"It's just a struggle to sweep a floor to be honest with you," Sherry Shelby explained. "It's a struggle. There's times my husband has to help me dress, has to help me put my shoes on. It's a daily struggle."

"I get up every morning in pain, until noon, 1 o'clock or something. I'm totally hurting," Lilli West said.

For these women, the pain is different, but for both, it's debilitating.

"It's really been bad, I mean, really been bad, because I've actually been in the bed or in the ER," West said. "At least three times a week in the bed and in the ER about once a month with the pain, just 'cause it gets so bad that I, I can't stand it."

PAIN DOCTOR OFFICE - LAWRENCE PETERS 7-12-2024 (1).jpeg

Sherry Shelby is a Kentucky woman who said she has been left in limbo, after her pain management doctor in Louisville was brought up on federal charges. (WDRB Image) July 12, 2024

Both of them rely on pain medication to get through the day.

"It's sad. I've had to live my life now around a bottle," Shelby said through tears. "We don't plan to get his deck dealt to us. We just gotta now learn how to play it."

Shelby is taking several medications a day: Hydrocodone, Tramadol, Naproxen and Gabapentin.

West is down to her last hydrocodone. She's now cutting her pill in half to try to make her medication last longer.

"I had one and a half," West said. "I took half, the other half this morning. If I take a half at a time, just in the mornings it'll do me for a couple days, but then throughout the rest of the day it is what it is. You just deal with it. What else can you do?"

They both saw the same pain management doctor, Dr. Lawrence Peters.

He's facing federal charges as part of a nationwide healthcare fraud operation.

In late 2018 and early 2019, court documents say Dr. Peters allowed his staff at the Pain Management Center of Kentucky in south Louisville to distribute opioids by giving them pre-signed prescriptions for controlled substances and told them to fill those prescriptions at his physician-owned pharmacy.

UofL Health said he is not employed by the hospital, but rents office space in a medical plaza at Mary & Elizabeth hospital.

"There was no protocol put in place for us patients," Shelby said. "You basically hung us up and let us dry. I mean, you just left us. I feel like I've been neglected. I feel like all his patients has been neglected."

The Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure has issued an emergency order of restriction suspending him from prescribing, administering, dispensing or otherwise utilizing controlled substances.

It has left his patients without medicine.

"I thought what has this doctor done?" West said. "I mean, what has he done to not be able to prescribe medicine?"

West didn't find out until after she tried to refill her prescription.

"For him to do that to his patients with no phone call, no letter, no email, no anything," Shelby said. "It took my pharmacist to call and tell me the news. If I don't have any of these medicines, I don't know what I will do."

It's not as simple as calling up another pain management doctor. They have to go back to their primary care doctor to get another referral. It's a process that could take months.

"A part of me feels like he's made us all addicts, but a part of me thanks him because I don't know what I would do if I didn't have it," Shelby said.

We reached out to Dr. Peters' attorney and the Medical Licensure Board but have not heard back.

No word yet on when the doctor will be in court or whether he'll be able to prescribe medicine again.

Related stories: 

Copyright 2024 WDRB Media. All Rights Reserved.