It’s a devastating report that’s sure to infuriate you and make you think twice about how much you trust the world of medicine.

Earlier this Wednesday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution debuted their Doctors & Sex Abuse project, an exhaustive multimedia look at the thousands of medical professionals discreetly and oftentimes only lightly disciplined for some form of sexual misconduct involving their patients since 1999.

During that period, more than 2,400 were publicly sanctioned by their licensing boards and hospitals for acts ranging from making sexually explicit comments to a patient to placing their mouth on a patient’s genitals while treating an infection on their abdomen. Amazingly if not unsurprisingly, these doctors were rarely reported to the police once patients filed a complaint. Instead, they underwent rehabilitation programs, took regular polygraph tests. or were assigned chaperones for a certain amount of time until they were declared cured and given back their full license privileges.

Other times, when doctors were barred from practicing in one state, they just as easily obtained licenses in another. And even when a case did make to the criminal courts, prosecutors often softened their eventual sentences to allow them to return to the office with nary a scratch to their reputation. All of these tactics should sound deeply familiar to those with any passing knowledge of the sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church. And much like that scandal, the lax actions taken by the medical profession allowed some doctors to repeatedly victimize their unknowing patients for years before they were stopped.

In total, the 7-reporter team found half of these sanctioned doctors are still actively practicing medicine today. And it’s likely that the cases they uncovered, lifted solely from publicly available records, only represent the tip of the iceberg.

“The AJC investigation discovered that state boards and hospitals handle some cases secretly. In other cases, medical boards remove once-public orders from their websites or issue documents that cloak sexual misconduct in vague language,” wrote the authors of the first article in the lengthy series. “When cases do come to the public’s attention, they are often brushed off by the medical establishment as freakishly rare.”

A perfect example of the latter might include Dr. David Newman, a lauded New York City doctor who made waves earlier this January after being accused of drugging then ejacuating on a female patient's face. Since then, at least 3 other women have stepped forward to accuse him of similar acts, and Newman is currently free on bail awaiting a criminal trial for one count of first-degree sexual abuse and four counts of third-degree sexual abuse.

The reams of documents and interviews obtained by the team are nothing short of impressive and heartbreaking in their scale. For those of you who are able to stomach the read, it’s worth your full attention.