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The D.C. Board of Dentistry has revoked the license of a longtime D.C. dentist with a holistic practice in Friendship Heights after a patient alleged he made inappropriate sexual contact with her and performed treatments that went beyond acceptable dental work.
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The board found in a detailed, 69-page order finalized last month that dentist Mark McClure engaged in sexual contact with a patient, misrepresented himself as a “doctor of integrative medicine,” performed services beyond the scope of his license and failed to maintain adequate records of his services.
In an interview with The Washington Post and in testimony before the board, a woman who McClure treated alleged the dentist gave her injections in all parts of her body, and touched her genital area while he claimed to be doing “muscle testing” to determine where to insert a needle. The woman spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her privacy, and The Post generally does not name victims in cases of alleged sexual assault.
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“The whole experience was a complete nightmare for me,” she said, stressing the toll it took on her three kids, ages 16, 14 and 10. “We’re suffering from the aftermath of someone else’s choices.”
McClure, who did not appear at the dental board’s hearing, said in a statement to The Post that the allegations were “baseless” and accused the board of being “prejudiced against me for practicing holistic dentistry.” A holistic dentist uses alternative practices and natural remedies, operating under the principle that dental health is connected to overall health.
“No sexual assault or similar action on my part ever took place,” McClure said.
National Integrated Health Associates, a holistic medicine practice in Friendship Heights that McClure partially owns, said in a statement that the revocation is being appealed “as Dr. McClure does not believe he was afforded due practice.”
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The practice also said in the statement that McClure was previously investigated by the dental board over what it described as “disagreements about biological and other forms of dentistry.”
The woman said she reported McClure’s conduct to police — though McClure has not been charged with any criminal wrongdoing, and the D.C. Police Department said in an email, “The case was suspended pending further information or evidence.”
The D.C. Attorney General’s Office, which represented the Department of Health in proceedings before the Board of Dentistry, declined to comment on whether it had referred the matter to the U.S. attorney’s office for possible criminal charges.
The U.S. attorney’s office said it cannot confirm nor deny if it was investigating the dentist.
“McClure demonstrated an abject disregard for his patients’ health, safety, and dignity,” said D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb in a statement. “There is no place in the District of Columbia for reckless, deceptive and predatory dental or medical practitioners.”
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Allegations of professional misconduct against McClure, who the attorney general’s office said is in his 70s, date back to at least 2019. That year, the board issued a notice of intent to take disciplinary action against the dentist, accusing him of performing services beyond the scope of his license and violating record keeping requirements, according to public records from D.C.'s Department of Health.
In 2021, McClure and the government reached an agreement, which put McClure on a two-year probation and banned him from offering neural therapy and any treatment plan for conditions “below a patient’s collarbone or in a patient’s ear or shoulder.”
In May 2022, the Department of Health suspended his license after the woman he treated came forward to allege improper contact. Multiple of McClure’s employees also had notified the board that he had violated the agreement with the city by practicing outside the scope of his license and keeping separate, handwritten files of procedures. One employee said that his staff had “been in the process of removing information from the dental records and shredding patient documents since November 2021,” according to a notice suspending his license.
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In its statement, National Integrated Health Associates denied allegations that the practice had “withheld certain records” and said the “board’s implication that NIHA was in any way responsible for misconduct is inaccurate.” The statement added that after his license was suspended, McClure “limited his role at NIHA in accordance with the summary suspension notice.”
The woman who alleged wrongdoing said she saw McClure for the first time in 2017. At that time, she was experiencing jaw pain and thought a biological dentist who uses nontraditional and sometimes controversial treatments could help take out her cavity fillings. She looked online and found McClure, who the board found was advertising himself as a “Doctor of Integrative Medicine,” though he was only licensed as a dentist.
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McClure, in his statement, said he has “extensive training in integrative dentistry and medicine, have taught hundreds of dentists and treated thousands of patients.”
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The woman alleged that starting in February 2018, McClure began to perform “neural therapy,” a procedure meant to treat chronic pain with local anesthetics. At first, she said he concentrated injections of Procaine in and around her mouth. Then, the woman told the board, McClure began to inject almost every part of her body, including her head, feet, legs, spine, kidneys, liver, gut, stomach and spleen.
In one instance, the woman told the board that McClure injected her pelvic bone, claiming that “heavy metals were inhibiting her libido.” She said in an interview that he also injected a scar from childbirth at the opening of her vagina, and one of those times, touched her genital area as he conducted what he termed “muscle testing” to determine where to insert the needle.
The woman said she started having night terrors after that incident. When she told McClure, the dentist began prescribing her Xanx and Ambien, she said. The board found he did not document those prescriptions in his dental records.
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The woman alleged that McClure behaved inappropriately. Once, after McClure asked her to drive him to the train station from his office, he “pulled a bottle out of his briefcase and just started urinating in it,” the woman testified before the board.
He also performed numerous “psychokinesiology sessions,” where he asked her for “emotional components to symptoms inhibiting her treatment” — though he was not licensed to do so, the board found. The woman said in an interview she trusted McClure as her doctor, and it took some time before she began to feel he was acting out of line.
“It’s a really scary space because you’re just thinking, I clearly missed all the signs, I wasn’t paying attention, and now I don’t trust my own intuition,” she said in the interview with The Post. “Once you’re 100 percent trusting, you let your guard down.”
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The woman said to The Post that she realized she needed to “get out” in 2019, about two and a half years after McClure started to treat her. At that point, she said she was experiencing crippling nerve pain in her lower back and shoulders. She said she could hardly sleep and was having multiple panic attacks a day. The prescription drugs were her only form of relief.
“He would cause the problem and then have a solution that kept me in this perpetual stuck state,” she said in an interview. “It was this weird psychological trapping.”
One day, the woman contacted McClure’s office for a Xanax refill and was told that “she could not be his patient anymore,” according to her testimony described in the board’s order. The woman said one of McClure’s employees gave her one refill.
The next month, the woman called again for a refill. A staff member said: “[H]e’s not giving it to you anymore. He’s already such on thin ice that he refuses,” the woman testified.
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The woman said she told the employee she was going to report McClure to the dental board.
Soon after, the woman said she received a call from her primary care physician, who was a mentee of McClure’s. That doctor — who was not named in the board’s order — said McClure had called her “frantic,” and that she was happy to refill the Xanax prescription, according to the woman’s testimony.
The woman said the primary care physician, who she had told previously about McClure’s treatment, then told her to come into her office to meet with McClure.
“I really believe your healing will come by using your voice and looking at your predator,” the primary care physician said, according to the woman’s account.
At that meeting, the woman testified that the two medical professionals “teamed up” on her, and her primary care physician told her she would stop prescribing Xanax if she reported McClure.
“She kept asking, kept asking, are you going to report him? Are you going to report him?” the woman told the board. “And I said, I don’t know. She goes, well, I just need you to know that if you do, there could be massive snowball effects on you and your family.”
Soon after, the woman had a seizure and was hospitalized, according to the order. She spent 45 days in a treatment center in Arizona to wean off Xanax.
While the board was looking into her case, McClure entered a consent order with the board from an unrelated complaint. That order banned him from performing any sort of neural therapy and injecting patients for any other reason than for anesthetic for dental procedures — though an employee alleged he violated it.
The D.C. Board of Dentistry found McClure guilty of all seven charges against him, writing that his “conduct illustrates the depths of the Respondent’s narcissistic desire to save himself regardless of the harm he had caused or would further cause his patient.”
He was banned from applying for another license for five years.
“Those three years, it was a blur,” the woman said. “So I just try to be as absolutely as present as I can be now. Like, if my kids are home, I’m engaging and just trying to make up for that time.”
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