Dr John Hart: tribunal hands down disciplinary decision into online peptide clinic director

A working doctor has pleaded guilty to professional misconduct after a tribunal heard his peptide clinic distributed the drugs online.

A Sydney doctor has admitted to engaging in professional misconduct for treating patients with peptides that were sold via an online clinic.

The NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal handed down its decision on Thursday following an investigation by the Health Care Complaints Commission into two separate complaints against Dr John Hart.

The first complaint related Dr Hart’s treatment of 29 patients between February 2014 to July 2016 via an online clinic called ‘Peptide Clinics Australia’ which he ran while working at the Elevate GP centre in the CBD and The Hart Clinic in Mosman.

Dr John Hart

The online clinic was advertised as offering a “medically driven hormone treatment program” that gave patients an option of filling out a questionnaire to check if it was safe to commence a program of growth hormone secreting peptides.

The questionnaire claimed that the use of peptides had “been proven to be safe and very effective” and asked prospective patients to identify their “interests” including anti-ageing, fat loss/weight loss, injury repair, muscle building and increased libido.

Once eligible, peptides were sent to patients via a courier along with syringes for injections and a generic email that included information about how to administer the drugs.

The NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal heard the case on Thursday.

A support team member would later contact patients to ask if they had any questions and if medical concerns were raised, Dr Hart would then engage with the patients via email. The tribunal heard some of the peptide purchasers were also made from patients who attended the Elevate GP centre and The Hart Clinic.

The HCCC investigation alleged Dr Hart failed to provide appropriate care and treatment for some of the patients by not conducting an appropriate assessment, obtaining adequate medical histories and not having an appropriate therapeutic purpose to provide the treatments.

At the tribunal hearing, Dr Hart denied the peptide clinic “was just a vending machine for peptides” but admitted he engaged “in very poor medical practice” that he was “guilty of unsatisfactory professional conduct and professional misconduct”.

He said he thought it was safer for him to prescribe peptides online rather than for people to buy them in gyms where there was no assessment of the patient and no quality control, but knew that the World Anti-Doping Agency had banned some peptides for athletes.

The second complaint investigated by the HCCC related to Mr Hart’s treatment of an elderly patient with dementia with an anti-ageing treatment which the HCCC said was “below the standard reasonably expected of a practitioner”.

The tribunal heard Dr Hart was interested in anti-ageing treatments including a program developed in America called the ‘Breseden protocol’ and that he thought his treatment plan “could potentially change the rate of progression of dementia”.

Dr Hart admitted to “unsatisfactory professional conduct and professional misconduct” in relation to the complaint.

The 60-year-old, who has worked as a GP since 2000 stood down from Peptide Clinics in 2016 and went on to work part-time at medical practices in Coffs Harbour from 2019 and South Grafton from 2020.

The tribunal members on Thursday said it would determine an appropriate penalty in relation to both complaints at another hearing at a later date.

Dr Hart is listed online as still working for both Coffs Harbour Medical Centre and South Grafton Medical Centre.

Both centres declined to comment when contacted.