A 20-year-old woman in Turkey has been arrested after it was revealed that she worked as a doctor in a public hospital, despite having never studied medicine. Ayşe Özkiraz’s family had always wanted her to become a doctor, so after graduating high school she took the medical school exam but failed. But she didn’t want to let her folks down, so instead of admitting her failure and moving on, she told them that she had gotten into the prestigious Capa Medical University and hat she was studying to become a doctor. She even faked her exam score and her enrollment papers so that her parents wouldn’t suspect anything, but this was only the beginning of her farse…

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“When I was a high school student, my parents wanted me to study in a medical school. They thought I would get a high score. But I did not get a good enough score to get into medical school,” Özkiraz recently explained. “When my family wanted to see the exam result document, I prepared a fake exam result document and showed it to them.” But the young girl did more than just lie to her family, she started lying to everyone. She settled into an Istanbul dormitory and told people that she was a medical student. She also printed a fake student ID card and started hanging around Capa Medical University, interacting with actual med students.

 

One day, when her mother got sick and had to be taken to a hospital in the city of Tekirdağ, Ayşe came home to be with her parent and actually started telling staff at the hospital that she was a doctor herself. She also lied about her age, claiming to be 25 when she was only 20 years old, and used fake university student cards, doctor ID cards and even a plaque showing that Özkiraz had graduated at the top of her class, in order to make her lie believable. After gaining the trust of the hospital staff, Ayşe Özkiraz was offered the chance to work there, and she jumped at the opportunity, despite having never studied, let alone practiced medicine.

 

“Over time, I gained the love and trust of the doctors in the hospital. A chief physician, whom I told that I wanted to become a pediatric surgeon, even included me in an operation. During the surgery, he told me, ‘come on, you stitch the wound,'” Özkiraz said. Somehow, the 20-year-old managed to pose as a doctor, but despite her efforts to keep up appearances, there was only so much she could do. Eventually, actual doctors at the hospital in Tekirdağ became suspicious, because she kept avoiding answering basic medical questions or simply answered wrong. When they became convinced that she was lying about her training, the staff called the police.

 

While searching Ayşe Özkiraz’s rented apartment, police found several fake ID cards from several hospitals in Turkey, counterfeit documents, and medical uniforms. She was arrested and eventually admitted to posing as a doctor for more than a year. The woman’s parents still can’t believe that their child would lie to them and believe that there must be more to Ayşe’s story.

 

“My child would never attempt such a thing,” Ayşe Özkiraz’s mother told reporters. “She ate meals in operating theaters, the head doctor was with her too. She is in photographs with the doctor. When we chatted on video calling, she’s sitting in the room with the nurses. Are these all lies? We can’t understand anything!” Ayşe Özkiraz isn’t the first person to pose as a doctor. Earlier this year, we wrote about a woman in France who posed as a general physician as well as an ophthalmology expert for more than 3 years, without having studied medicine. Another woman in India managed to work as a doctor for 5 years before being discovered and exposed as a fraud.