Lexington Herald-Leader: "When prosecutors here talked about the cruelty of John E. Curran, it was the face of Taylor Alves they saw.
The young woman, who, at 18, was a filmmaker, photographer and model, was described by her mother as 'born with wings.' She was also dying of ovarian cancer.
Curran, who billed himself as a natural healer and physician, told her he could make her healthy with a green drink, a concoction of powdered vegetables in water. The promise of recovery led her to spend her final weeks refusing other food.
'He did so much harm on so many levels,' Rhonda Alves, Taylor's mother, said recently. 'I don't blame John Curran for Taylor dying. What I blame John Curran for is the anguish he brought to her life.'
In August, Curran, who charged most patients a standard fee of $10,000 for his treatments, was sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison on charges of wire fraud and money laundering.
Curran, 41, followed the same course of study as two men who appeared on the Kentucky medical scene: Andrew E. Michael and Larry Lammers.
Michael was welcomed to Lexington's Central Baptist Hospital in 2003 and briefly observed heart specialists there treating patients.
In 2004, Lammers cared for patients at several accident injury clinics in the state. Lammers and Michael have also been convicted of practicing medicine without a license and have received jail sentences.
Curran, Michael and Lammers all worked toward medical degrees from online schools that were promoted from the remote mountain community of Falcon, Ky. There, sitting at a computer, was the man behind the schools -- Stephen J. Arnett, 47, who had been a Free Will Baptist minister before becoming involved in the medical field, court records say.
Arnett first opened several medical clinics in Eastern Kentucky, where he worked without a license as an assistant to the very doctors he hired. When the clinics closed, he moved on to promoting various online schools that offered degrees in medicine and naturopathy -- a system of healing with natural substances. The schools were neither accredited nor licensed. ...
The most prominent of the schools Arnett has been associated with is St. Luke School of Medicine, which has had a number of incarnations. St. Luke and its Southern Graduate Institute -- a division that focused on naturopathy -- are central to the criminal cases against Curran, Michael and Lammers.
Arnett was also tied to Lady Malina Memorial Medical College; the University of Sciences, Arts and Technology, with an address on the volcanic island of Montserrat in the Caribbean; and the Asian-American University. ...
By 2002, Arnett was forming new Internet medical schools, according to state records.
He incorporated a company called Foreign Alternative Medical Education, as well as St. Luke School of Medicine. Both had a Falcon, Ky., address that Arnett used.
Not long afterward, Robert Irving, a student from one of Arnett's online schools, was warned by the state medical licensing board to close a medical practice he had begun in Elizabethtown, according to board documents.
Irving said he received a doctor of naturopathy degree from Southern Graduate Institute, a division of St. Luke, in 2001. His contact was Arnett. Irving did six-week rotations for orthopedics, physical rehabilitation and anesthesiology at an Accident Injury Center in Lexington where Larry Lammers worked."
