Former Children's doctor agrees not to practice in North Carolina

A former Children's Hospital Boston doctor accused of molesting young patients will no longer practice medicine in North Carolina under an agreement reached today, The News and Observer reports.

Dr. Melvine D. Levine, a nationally known pediatrician and best-selling author, had been chief of ambulatory pediatrics at Children's until 1985. He later moved to North Carolina, where he ran a clinic at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and founded a research institute called All Kinds of Minds. His Massachusetts license expired in 1989, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine said today.

A lawsuit filed in Boston in April accused Levine of abusing at least seven boys who came to him for treatment between 1980 and 1985. After the lawsuit was filed, Levine voluntarily stopped seeing patients at the UNC clinic and changed his license status to "inactive."

The North Carolina Medical Board launched an investigation into the lawsuit's allegations. Today's action will keep Levine's license inactive, the Observer story says. The board held no hearing and did not resolve whether Levine did or did not behave inappropriately.

"Our greatest discipline we could mete out on any licensee would be revocation or indefinite suspension," board chairman Dr. George Saunders told the Observer. "This actually goes further than that."

Levine has consistently denied any wrongdoing. His lawyer, Alan Schneider, told the Observer today that Levine wanted to put the episode behind him, and had agreed to a keep his license inactive permanently.

"For a man who is innocent of these charges, these allegations have been very disheartening," Schneider said in the story.

The lawsuit in Massachusetts is still pending, the story says.