High-profile Indian doctor Tonmoy Sharma, who appeared on British television shows, has been banished for practicing in Britain after he was found guilty of carrying out wrong drugs examinations on patients suffering from mental illness, and of lying about his educational qualifications.

The General Medical Council (GMC) of Britain has struck off Tonmoy’s name from the medical register, which means he won’t be able to practice medicine in the country.
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Tonmoy Sharma, who was a senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, has been revealed as a fraud person who repeatedly referred himself as a "professor" while records showed that he had never done a PhD thesis.
     
In spite of this, Mr. Sharma, who was filed at the Clinical Neuroscience Research Centre in Dartford, Kent, often used the letters PhD after his name and managed to betray the NHS and a few of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies.

The GMC panel found Sharma guilty of serious failings of personal integrity after learning that he recruited mentally ill patients to examine drugs without seeking proper authorization.

Andrew Popat, chairman of the panel, told Sharma, “Your persistent and wide-ranging dishonesty and untruthfulness, spanning a number of years, together with your lack of insight, is so serious that it is fundamentally incompatible with your continuing to be a registered medical practitioner.”

Mr. Popat stated that Sharma, who wrote various books on mental illness, had contributed much towards the development of medical science and was highly regarded by his fellow workers

The 42-year-old, who hails from Assam, was found to have behaved inexpertly for five major studies between 1997 and 2003, involving four major pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lilly and the Janssen Research Foundation.

He also misguided the companies when he selected to make use of the same patients in various studies, subjecting them to MRI scans and examinations that had not been sanctioned by an ethics committee. In 2003, he enrolled mental health patients in unwanted telephone calls and without permission from their physicians. After that, he failed to provide them appropriate information about the trials.

Initially his wrongdoing was uncovered by the drugs company Sanofi, and a complaint resulting in his temporary suspension was made to the Institute of Psychiatry in 2001, prompting an investigation.

Sharma, who represented himself at the hearing, denied the claims and insisted that he "believed in ethics in medicine".