A North Texas parent addressed the Texas Medical Board about his interaction with the Flower Mound emergency medicine physician who called Child Protective Services after he criticized the care he received from her.
Deric Cahill’s interaction with Children’s PM Urgent Care made headlines last year after CPS came to his home to investigate abuse as a result of Dr. Diana Huston’s report of a severely dehydrated child. TMB couldn’t confirm any investigation, but Cahill’s original case number appears in the TMB minutes from the December 7-8 meeting, which say that the board carried the motion to “grant the appeal for case 23-7119 and send back to investigations for review by pediatric experts to consider whether the standard of care was met, including the appropriateness of the referral to CPS.”
In a statement Cahill gave to the Texas Medical Board and uploaded to YouTube, he describes what happened last year. In July 2023, Cahill scheduled an appointment for his 2-year-old son to visit Children’s Health PM Urgent Care. Cahill says the visit was less than five minutes with Huston and that she didn’t offer or run any tests on their son or ask Cahill and his wife any questions about his child’s behavior before the visit. Cahill says that Huston told them everything looked fine before referring them to the emergency room for several tests to rule out anything more serious, though Cahill says she provided no reasoning as to why she was ordering them.
“When we were visibly confused, she simply repeated herself,” Cahill says in the video. Cahill says he told Huston how transactional the appointment felt, and they left the building. He left a negative Google review and wrote an email to the company’s corporate office (not Children’s Health in Dallas) describing his experience.
Three hours later, a CPS worker showed up at the Cahill home, and Cahill says the CPS agent said she was expecting to see a gravely ill child based on the report CPS received. The case was dismissed within 30 days. Two weeks later, Cahill received the official medical report. “We discovered that Diana Huston fabricated her notes and embellished her report to CPS to include our son being dehydrated, Cahill says. ” The report said the Cahills told Huston that the toddler wasn’t eating and was not behaving normally. “This never happened, and reads more like Diana knew exactly which points to emphasize to prioritize a CPS visit.”
Five hours after the visit with Huston, the Cahills took their son to another urgent care, which told them to continue monitoring the child. The next day, Cahill says, the fever broke, and the child recovered.
Cahill submitted written and video evidence showing his child’s behavior and the conflicting medical notes. After making a complaint with the TMB, he first received a letter from the TMB denying his complaint, saying Huston always acted in the child’s best interest. “Fabricating an official medical record, filing an embellished report to CPS, and jeopardizing a family’s cohesiveness by weaponizing her position is not in the best interest of any child,” he told the board. He spoke to the board after it changed course and granted the appeal.
Cahill says that even if Huston felt she had legitimate concerns, why didn’t she explain her referral, call an ambulance, or administer hydration? “Of all of Diana’s available options, she chose CPS, the most severe and punitive of options that she had available to her.”
Cahill asks the board to consider the result of the CPS report and the evidence he submitted in deciding what to do. “This board has to consider that Diana acted out of retaliation and not out of compassion or caution,” he says. “I ask the board to revisit the decision considering the weight of the accusation and the overwhelming corroborating evidence that I have provided.”
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