Patient Dies After Oxygen Valve Sucks His Face, Empties His Lungs; Clinic Fined $403,000

An Australian "alternative health facility" and its founder are being fined a total of over half a million dollars after one of the clinic's disabled patients died during a therapy session in 2016.

A Victorian County Court fined South Yarra clinic Oxymed AUD$550,000 ($403,600) while sole director Malcolm Hooper must pay AUD$176,750 ($129,700) for three workplace safety offences connected to the April 6, 2016 death of patient Craig Dawson, local newspaper The Canberra Times reported.

Dawson, who could not walk and had a history of life-threatening seizures, was inside a hyperbaric oxygen chamber when a fault in a valve caused the mask delivering pure oxygen to suddenly suck into his face, which emptied his lungs and triggered a heart attack, a report by News.com.au said.

Dawson would die of cardiac arrest in a hospital a few days after the incident, as per The Canberra Times. He had reportedly been undergoing twice-weekly, four-hour sessions at the Oxymed clinic for 18 months prior to the incident.

Hooper, 61, was found guilty last month of two counts of failing to ensure a safe workplace and pleaded guilty to another in relation to Dawson's death. He also pleaded guilty on Aug. 2 to two related minor charges, which were failure to notify government agency WorkSafe Victoria of a reportable incident and failure to preserve a site after an incident.

Judge Amanda Fox described Oxymed — which was previously named HyperMed — as an "alternative health facility" that used hyperbaric oxygen therapy for treatments "outside the mainstream," according to the News.com.au report.

"You do not need medical qualifications to own and operate these sorts of chambers," Fox said.

Hooper's clinic had an inadequate risk assessment system in place, according to the court.

Hooper, a former doctor, was struck off as a chiropractor in 2013 after the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal found him guilty of professional misconduct for charging a patient with cerebral palsy AUD$50,000 ($36,680) for oxygen treatments, and he was also found to have "misrepresented" the treatment's effectiveness, as per News.com.au.

Experts reportedly told court that the use of oxygen therapy to treat multiple sclerosis was controversial, not supported by scientific data or approved by Medicare — Australia's universal health insurance program.