YOUNGSTOWN — A medical doctor with a practice in Lake Milton was arrested Thursday and charged in federal court with illegally distributing drugs and committing health care fraud.

Dr. Martin Escobar, 56, was arraigned on the charges Thursday in U.S. District Court, Northern District Ohio, Youngstown. Details of the hearing were not available.

Federal officials took him into custody without incident at his Boardman home earlier in the day.

According to a criminal complaint, Escobar prescribed medications such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, lorazepam and alprazolam “outside the usual course of professional practice.”

Escobar, whose specialty is internal medicine and has been in practice 21 years, is accused of using false diagnoses to prescribe such drugs, falsfying patient pain levels in medical charts and ignoring the results of patients’ urine drug screens.

The government alleges Escobar tested the urine of patients for the presence of drugs that he prescribed, then ignored the results of certain patients.

The results “repeatedly indicated the absence of prescribed drugs in the urine of the tested patients, suggesting the patients were … diverting them on the street,” the government said.

Escobar then continued to issue prescriptions to these patients and bill the government for the tests. The criminal complaint states the crimes occurred from at least January 2018 through May of 2019. His practice is located at 17674 Mahoning Ave., Suite B.

His medical license is active, according to the Ohio Medical Board, but the board’s online records indicate he was reprimanded in 2011 by the state medical board for failing to provide proper docmentation of having completed continuing medical education hours for the 2010 to 2012 period “as well as the two additional CME periods thereafter.”

In 2007, the medical board also found that he failed to complete the required CME hours for the period from Oct. 2, 2006, through Oct. 1, 2008, period and provide documentation by the deadline.

He received his medical degree from Ross University School of Medicine in Dominica, an island in the Caribbean, according to the medical board. He completed two years of postgraduate training at Forum Health Northside Medical Center and became licensed to practice medicine and surgery in Ohio in 2001.

erunyan@tribtoday.com