I have been fighting a battle since 1993. Some say they would have given up a long time ago. Others say I’m lucky that I still have my home and my clinic although payments on everything are always late. I’ve also been told that I’m lucky I’ve only spent about $500k or so even though it translates into several million down the road.

Thanks to Rich Willner and a few other friends and relatives I’m still alive and kicking. There are some extremely important rules about going up against hospitals and boards; the faster someone accepts them as fact, the better chance they have of prevailing.

Rich Willner is without a doubt the number one expert in the United States on this subject. I know that’s saying a lot, but I have spent hundreds of hours speaking to him and we have exchanged somewhere in the range of thousands of emails.

He reads every case he can get his hands on and understands how the evil system works. Most of our conversations lately have been about people who are spending hundreds of thousands on lawyers who don’t have a clue what they’re doing. When a lawyer calls Rich, Rich can give them the legal cases they need to try to make a difference.

Rich is worth his weight in gold and then some when it comes to someone who has been abused as some of us have. Just take a look at www.briangale.com. The web site was Rich’s idea. At first, my wife and I really hesitated because I was in the process of cashing in my entire retirement (not that it was that big) as well as our kids colleges savings, just to be able to pay some bills. Reluctantly we went along with it and it has been given us a tremendous return on our very small investment.

The web site literally neutralized a lot of the “evil doers” as President Bush calls them. There is no time to fight back and get on the offensive because all of the shammed person’s time is spent on the defensive side.

I spent 8 years and now I have finally managed to have almost all of the members of our state board that shammed me replaced. I did this only with the help of Rich Willner.

For those of you who read this and are in a similar predicament; join the Center for Peer Review Justice. It was the ONLY thing I did in the past 8 years that saved me.

I’m not out of this mess yet but I’m in better shape now than I have ever been. I understand the system and the players. Now I tell my lawyer what he needs to do and how to handle things after Rich and I have extensive discussions about it. My lawyer is still involved and has the final say about what he will and won’t do and everything that is done is legal; whether the lawyer(s) know about it or not.

These people (shammers) take very little time to do one thing that creates years of pain, suffering and nightmares for us and our families. Depression is a given for all of us. At times we are paralyzed emotionally and physically so we are too weak to fight back. We try to hold our families together because they are the most precious commodity we have and that takes so much time and energy that there is nothing left.

Rich Willner has given me hope. He has been the “equalizer” for me. Why did he get involved? Because he loves a challenge and he couldn’t believe that the things I posted publicly on another forum could be true. When he did his own investigation a few years ago, he began opening up the world of sham peer review.

As bad as things are and have been, I still have many things to be thankful for. I am alive, I have my health. For some reason I still have my wife (many leave for obvious reasons) and little girls too. Many of us who have been shammed are not as lucky as me. If I could take all the pain my wife has endured away and put it inside me because of what I have been put through, I would gladly take it from her.

In simple terms the answer is networking and fighting back. Think of it as the ultimate challenge of your life. There are no rules except for the ones the shammers make up as they go. You have nothing to lose because your (my) life has been destroyed professionally. Take it on as if it becomes your only mission in life. “Take no prisoners.” You have to pull out every bit of passion you can muster and keep pushing on.

The first step is to contact Rich AND do what he says; take his advice. We have to begin aggressively helping each other. A huge advantage that Rich gives us is that he can get a number of reviews for anyone at any given time from authoritative leaders in the specialty field of his choice. If anyone needs my help I’m available. This is not a fight that can be won with just the lawyers through the courts. That’s what they want us to do is go through the legal process. It doesn’t cost them a penny while it breaks us and our families.

Brian Gale, DPM, FACFAS 701-255-3338 clinic 701-202-1885 cellular 701-223-8841 home