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A 20-year-old woman in Turkey has been arrested after
it was revealed that she worked as a doctor in a public hospital,
despite having never studied medicine.
Ayşe Özkiraz’s family had always wanted her to become a doctor, so after
graduating high school she took the medical school exam but failed. But
she didn’t want to let her folks down, so instead of admitting her
failure and moving on, she told them that she had gotten into the
prestigious Capa Medical University and hat she was studying to become a
doctor. She even faked her exam score and her enrollment papers so that
her parents wouldn’t suspect anything, but this was only the beginning
of her farse…
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“When I was a high school student, my parents wanted me to study in a
medical school. They thought I would get a high score. But I did not get
a good enough score to get into medical school,” Özkiraz recently
explained. “When my family wanted to see the exam result document, I
prepared a fake exam result document and showed it to them.”
But the young girl did more than just lie to her family, she started
lying to everyone. She settled into an Istanbul dormitory and told
people that she was a medical student. She also printed a fake student
ID card and started hanging around Capa Medical University, interacting
with actual med students.
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One day, when her mother got sick and had to be taken to a hospital in
the city of Tekirdağ, Ayşe came home to be with her parent and actually
started telling staff at the hospital that she was a doctor herself. She
also lied about her age, claiming to be 25 when she was only 20 years
old, and used fake university student cards, doctor ID cards and even a
plaque showing that Özkiraz had graduated at the top of her class, in
order to make her lie believable.
After gaining the trust of the hospital staff, Ayşe Özkiraz was offered
the chance to work there, and she jumped at the opportunity, despite
having never studied, let alone practiced medicine.
“Over time, I gained the love and trust of the doctors in the hospital.
A chief physician, whom I told that I wanted to become a pediatric
surgeon, even included me in an operation. During the surgery, he told
me, ‘come on, you stitch the wound,'” Özkiraz said.
Somehow, the 20-year-old managed to pose as a doctor, but despite her
efforts to keep up appearances, there was only so much she could do.
Eventually, actual doctors at the hospital in Tekirdağ became
suspicious, because she kept avoiding answering basic medical questions
or simply answered wrong. When they became convinced that she was lying
about her training, the staff called the police.
While searching Ayşe Özkiraz’s rented apartment, police found several
fake ID cards from several hospitals in Turkey, counterfeit documents,
and medical uniforms. She was arrested and eventually admitted to posing
as a doctor for more than a year.
“My child would never attempt such a thing,” Ayşe Özkiraz’s mother told
reporters. “She ate meals in operating theaters, the head doctor was
with her too. She is in photographs with the doctor. When we chatted on
video calling, she’s sitting in the room with the nurses. Are these all
lies? We can’t understand anything!”
Ayşe Özkiraz isn’t the first person to pose as a doctor. Earlier this
year, we wrote about a woman in France who posed as a general physician
as well as an ophthalmology expert for more than 3 years, without having
studied medicine. Another woman in India managed to work as a doctor for
5 years before being discovered and exposed as a fraud.
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