When he put his lips on a patient’s breast, Dr. Sastri Maharajh did something that would have been treated as sexual assault if it had occurred outside his examination room.

But because the zero-tolerance policy used by the province’s medical watchdog doesn’t include the word “breast,” Maharajh was allowed to continue practising after an eight-month suspension of his licence.

Now the Mississauga family doctor can see patients, with a single caveat: they cannot be women.

The situation highlights a difficult ethical question for health-care experts across the country: when a doctor commits an offence so egregious that he is restricted from ever seeing female patients, should he be allowed to continue to see male ones?

A Star investigation found 21 doctors in the province currently have gender-specific restrictions on their practices. Of those, 20 were male doctors not permitted to see female patients without restrictions. One was a male doctor who had restrictions against seeing male patients.http://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/2014/11/07/abuse_by_doc...