Dr. Sandeep Kapoor has written a new memoir about his time treating Anna Nicole Smith, the Playboy model who passed away in 2007 due to an accidental drug overdose.
The book is titled Trust Me, I’m a Doctor: My Life Before, During and After Anna Nicole Smith. It details Kapoor’s controversial relationship with the model, and addressed the allegations against him for providing her with the medication that led to her death. Kapoor takes a look at the blurred lines between doctor and patient. He also asserts that Smith wasn’t a drug addict, she was just a person who misused drugs.
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“You can be on medication and be tolerant of them and that is not addiction,” he explained to Fox News. “What I mean by misuse is that she would sometimes undertake medication and sometimes stop them from withdrawal. And a lot of people misuse medication. A lot of people take medication wrong.”
“Some people miss doses or they don’t complete things,” he went on. “There was a time when she would not take them the way they were prescribed. Yes, there were times she would take more… but this was due to her chronic pain… I don’t treat patients with habitual addiction.”
Kapoor’s memoir goes all the way back to the beginning of his relationship with Smith, when she contacted him for help with chronic pain.
“She had back pain, she had some issues with her breast implants and had several injuries,” Kapoor recalled. “She had been dealing with pain for many years and had tried to deal with it. She was previously on a methadone regimen, which is used to treat chronic pain. It’s not just used on patients dealing with heroin.”
The book doesn’t shy away from the contentious aspects of their relationship either, when Kapoor was photographed by the L.A. Times with Smith at the annual gay pride parade in West Hollywood in 2005. Kapoor was wearing a t-shirt that said “Trust Me, I’m a Doctor.”
Kapoor detailed the event in a diary entry, which was read aloud in court in 2009 during a trial to determine whether Smith’s doctors should be prosecuted for prescribing her the medication that took her life.
“I was making out with Anna, my patient, blurring the lines. I gave her methadone, Valium. Can she ruin me?” Kapoor wrote.
Today, the doctor says he can’t minimize or shy away from the accusations.
“I’m very open about that,” he said. “The day that the photographs were taken was just one day. One afternoon… It wasn’t the right thing to do. I wrote about it in my diary, which further fueled the prosecution’s case.”
However, the doctor does want to stress that he only saw his patient outside of a work setting that one time.
“I never had any social interactions with her before or after that event. It’s one day taken out of context and I’m open about it… I realize it was not a very good thing to do.”
Kapoor’s book is availabe now.
