Psychiatrist Douglas Rank, attacked patient with sword after she broke off their "relationship"

November 12, 2010

On or about October 20, 2010, Kentucky psychiatrist Douglas Rank pleaded guilty to first-degree assault, in a plea to a grand jury indictment on a charge of attempted murder. 

According to reports, Rank attacked and stabbed a woman with a sword.  The woman was identified as a patient whom Rank had “plied with narcotics and had sex with” and whom he attacked when she broke off their relationship. 

The crime occurred in an apartment above Rank’s one-room medical office in Sanders, Kentucky.  The woman survived albeit with “a good amount of surgery and an extended hospital stay.” 

The Board has disciplined Rank twice before for engaging in a sexual relationship with a patient (2000) and for inappropriately prescribing controlled substances to a female patient with whom he failed to maintain appropriate physician-patient boundaries (2001). 

His medical license is currently listed as inactive.

Source: Amended Emergency Order of Suspension, in re: The License to Practice Medicine in the Commonwealth of Kentucky held by Douglas H. Rank, M.D., license no. 27590 and Jim Hannah, “Guilty plea in sword attack,” Cincinnati.com, October 20, 2010.