AN ADVANCED radiation therapy center in Salinas, in which two Monterey Peninsula urologists have a financial stake, has been bombarding patients with radiation treatments they don’t need because there’s so much money to be made from the procedure, according to an investigation published last week by Bloomberg News Service.

Salinas Valley Urology Associates — owned by Aytac Apaydin and Steven Worsham, and used for referrals and treatments by Monterey urologists Anthony Shaheen and David Flemming — has treated prostate cancer patients with its $2 million IMRT accelerator, even though other therapies would have been just as good or better and cost much less, according to reporter Peter Waldman.

And the reason the doctors do it is to make money — lots of money, Waldman reported. Medicare reimburses up to $40,000 for a course of radiation therapy, and private insurance pays even more, he said. The doctors who own SVUA and physicians who refer patients there can earn more than $1 million a year, Waldman reported.

This week, Apaydin and Worsham issued a press release saying they were “surprised and disappointed” at the accusations in Waldman’s story, which they said had its “facts wrong.”

“All of our patients are fully informed of their treatment options,” the doctors said. Furthermore, the decision to treat someone with SVUA’s radiation equipment is a made by a patient and his doctor, and “the physicians and staff at Salinas Valley Urology Associates honor and respect our patients’ decisions,” the release said.

But Waldman’s research showed that use of radiation therapy at medical facilities around the country typically goes way up as soon as doctors acquire their own radiation therapy machines. A 1989 federal statute prohibiting doctors from sending patients to medical facilities they own has a loophole allowing them to treat them with equipment in their own offices.

“IMRT is overused, period,” said Matthew Cooperberg, a University of California San Francisco urologist who has studied the issue. He estimates that about half the 50,000 men who receive the radiation treatment in the United States each year don’t need it, or “don’t gain anything from it that exceeds cheaper treatment, resulting in about $1 billion of overspending,” most of it courtesy of U.S. taxpayers via Medicare, according to Waldman.

The Bloomberg story also cited local statistics to illustrate the overuse of SVUA’s radiation therapy equipment, which is in south Salinas, not far from Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital.

In 2006, before the SVUA facility opened, Salinas Valley Memorial performed 16 surgical prostate removals. In 2011, it did none. At Monterey’s Community Hospital, surgeries dropped from 21 to 4 during the same period.

And the discrepancy didn’t occur because SVUA’s radiation machine was new to the county; CHOMP already had one, and another facility in Salinas did, too, according to local doctors.

The difference was that the handful of  physicians who own SVUA and who sent patients there could make a killing from the use of its machine, according to Waldman’s report.

A Salinas oncologist, Laura Stampleman, said Apaydin tried to get her involved in the scheme, calling it a “gold mine.” But she declined to participate, she said.

Waldman managed to uncover the stories of several local patients who were treated with radiation at SVUA under what they said were false pretenses.

“He gave me radiation 47 days. No one gave me an examination to determine the length I should get radiation,” said Max Calderon, a retired construction worker who appears on a bloomberg.com video prepared by Waldman. His doctor was Amir Saffarian. “There’s something fishy going on,” Calderon said.

In 2006, a Salinas resident, Wallace Ahyte, said he was told by Apaydin he had prostate cancer and advised to have radiation treatment at the facility Apaydin was building at the time.

“He recommended that I wait until the facility was finished. In the meantime, he said, ‘I’m going to give you shots,’” Ahyte said. But then he saw other doctors, who told him he didn’t need any treatment at all.

Monterey resident Richard Dunsay was told by Shaheen last year he had prostate cancer. Instead of sending him to CHOMP, Shaheen offered a limousine to take him to the SVUA facility in Salinas.

“I was concerned that Dr. Shaheen was pushing this Salinas deal,” Dunsay said. “And I kept saying to myself, ‘CHOMP is right here, so why would I have to go all the way to Salinas?’”

And when he went to another doctor for a second opinion, he was told he didn’t need radiation treatment at all.

“What you have is extremely minor, and all we have to do is watch it every six months,” Dunsay said the doctor told him.

A Georgetown University researcher who’s studied the issue said that when doctors have a financial stake in an IMRT machine, use of it “roughly triples within about two years,” Waldman reported — much of it at a high cost to taxpayers and for little patient benefit.

Federal investigators are reportedly going over SVUA’s records with a fine-toothed comb to determine if self-referral and anti-racketeering laws have been broken.