I’m a residency director, and this sounds woefully incomplete. Nobody leaves “voluntarily” 4.5 years into an ENT residency.
Residency faculty meet every six months to discuss the progress of each resident in what’s called the Clinical Competency Committee (CCC). The timing makes me think CCC went badly for her and they told her to get her shit together or else.
They might have let her resign to avoid probation or being fired. Probation in residency makes getting a license or privileges in the future much more difficult, or at least a bigger pain in the ass. Being fired from residency is professionally devastating. A program will almost always offer the chance to resign to make it easier for the resident to finish somewhere else.
Residency faculty are notorious for damning with faint praise. When the faculty member in the LA Times story called her “competent”, I cringed a little. It’s like someone saying the dinner you cooked was “fine”. There’s definitely a giant “but…” there.
I should point out that none of this would necessarily make her a bad person, or even a bad doctor. Plenty of good docs have had a tough time in residency and had to take some time off, or even got probation.
That said, she appears to be an utter quack, and probably isn’t in the million most qualified Americans to hold this post. Hell, I’m significantly more qualified than her, and that’s really sad.