Octuplets doctor to face malpractice charges

The California Medical Board said Michael Kamrava acted "beyond the reasonable judgment of any treating physician" by repeatedly providing fertility treatment to a woman identified in the complaint only by the initials "NS".

Ms Nadya Suleman, who previously identified Dr Kamrava as her doctor, gave birth to the world's longest-living set of octuplets on January 26 last year. She already had six other children.

Dr Kamrava is accused of gross negligence in three instances: transferring too many embryos, repeatedly transferring fresh embryos when frozen ones were available, and failing to refer Ms Suleman for a mental health evaluation.

He is also accused of giving Ms Suleman too much of a hormone while stimulating in-vitro fertilisation, poor record keeping and "failure to recognise that NS's behaviour was outside the norm and that her conduct was placing her offspring at risk for potential harm".

Journalists' calls to Dr Kamrava's office were not returned, but his lawyer Peter Osinoff said fertility patients were not typically screened for mental health problems "unless there is overt evidence of pathology, and there was not overt evidence of pathology, that will be our argument".

He added that Dr Kamrava wanted to continue practicing medicine.

Ms Suleman has said she underwent the IVF treatment that bore octuplets because she did not want her frozen embryos to go to waste. But the complaint said Dr Kamrava never used frozen embryos in her pregnancies and his lawyer said Ms Suleman requested fresh embryos be used to improve chances of success.

The document reveals Ms Suleman underwent a long series of fertility treatments from 1997 to 2008 under Dr Kamrava's care.

She first went to Kamrava's Beverly Hills office at age 21 and underwent artificial insemination using donor sperm. She failed to get pregnant twice using that method.

In 1999, she consulted with Dr Kamrava about IVF and underwent a similar procedure, but it led to an ectopic pregnancy. She began hormone therapy in 2000, commonly done before IVF to improve the chances of harvesting a healthy, viable egg. Her first child was born in 2001.

Over the next several years, she repeatedly returned for IVF treatment.