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The arrest took place in December, 2011, but the matter reached the preliminary hearing stage a year later. The accused, Carlos Guzmangarza of San Francisco, faces several felony charges of posing as a doctor and performing medical procedures without any license (other than perhaps a drivers license.) Guzmangarza allegedly set up the Derma Clinic on Mission Street and lured his victims with cut rate (no pun intended) deals. One woman who came to Derma Clinic was quoted $3,000 for an eye lift and abdominal
liposuction, an amount far lower than that quoted by other clinics. The downside was that Guzmangarza performed the surgery while smoking a cigar and asked the patient to hold her own IV bag. The fake Doc also is alleged to have carried six pounds of fat removed during the liposuction procedure to the woman’s house, showed her the substance and then flushed it down her home toilet. What’s wrong with this picture?
Further charges involve the series of acne-treating facial injections given to the woman’s daughter and the raping of another patient after she paid him $5,000 to do a buttock augmentation procedure (we’re not even going to go there). Investigation revealed that Guzmangarza was using the name of Carlos Guzman, a duly licensed physician’s assistant employed by a practicing doctor — but neither the real Guzman nor the physician he worked for had any affiliation with Derma Clinic. Meanwhile, the cigar-smoking wannabe Guzmangarza remains in custody on $1 million bail and faces 30+ years in prison if convicted on the counts of rape, battery, assault, practicing medicine without a license, false impersonation, identity theft, and grand theft.