Mothers get a big boost for counseling to help with childbirth depression

February 21, 2019, 7:46 am

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Roughly 1 in 7 moms, who, during or after pregnancy, suffer debilitating depression — losses of energy or concentration, changes in sleeping and eating patterns, feelings of worthlessness or suicidal thoughts — now may get counseling that has proven helpful to women and their babies.

Preventive health experts have called on medical providers to guide women to this specialized care that could benefit 180,000 to 800,000 mothers each year. Because this treatment has been put forward this way, women also can get help affording it. As the New York Times reported, the recommendation for maternal depression counseling, by the United States Preventive Services Task Force, means insurers must cover the services — with no co-payments — under the Affordable Care Act.

Experts told the newspaper the USPSTF action was an important step on perinatal depression, noting:

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Hundreds of moms die of preventable pregnancy-related complications

May 14, 2019, 5:32 am

≫ Next: As doctors warned UNC about heart surgery program, kids kept dying

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Hundreds of mothers die of preventable pregnancy-related complications up to a year after delivering their babies, with black and native women experiencing notably high maternal morality risks.

The needless deaths of around 700 women nationwide each year due to cardiovascular conditions, infections, hemorrhages and other complications related to their pregnancies underscores the importance of improving maternal care, especially in increasing its access and quality, the federal Centers for Disease Control reported in a new study.

The Washington Post quoted Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s principal deputy director, commenting on the agency data:

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As doctors warned UNC about heart surgery program, kids kept dying

June 3, 2019, 3:30 am

≫ Next: New hospitals may offer hope to D.C.’s poor, minority areas as Covid-19 rages

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Although big hospitals may love to pat themselves on the back and boost their profits and professional standings by claiming to offer “comprehensive” services, children may suffer and die due to the reality versus the hubris of institutions’ excessive initiatives with specialized care.

Officials at the University of North Carolina blew past anguished warnings from their own pediatric cardiology staff of significant problems in the pediatric heart surgery program at the medical center’s children’s hospital, the New York Times reported. Brushing aside their concerns about a lack of resources within and to support the program, UNC declined to make public, as most similar specialty efforts do, key performance measures. They would show that the UNC pediatric heart surgery program had a higher death rate than “nearly all 82 institutions that do publicly report” this and other measures of patient care.

The newspaper, in a rare move, has internal tape recordings of doctors disputing among themselves whether dwindling resources, staff departures, and other problems meant that UNC should do what many of the specialists demanded — take a long hard look at what was going wrong, and, in the meantime, refer sick kids to other institutions to safeguard their care.

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New hospitals may offer hope to D.C.’s poor, minority areas as Covid-19 rages

May 13, 2020, 12:45 pm

≫ Next: Concern rises over bias in race-based algorithms for medical decision-making

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Even as the Covid-19 pandemic shows the terrible toll inflicted on African Americans in the District of Columbia by health care disparities, city officials have announced they are advancing with a pricey plan to plug a giant hole in area medical services by helping to fund not one but two new hospitals that will serve impoverished communities of color.

The facilities will be in Wards 1 and 8 and will replace the Howard University Hospital and the United Medical Center (UMC) in Southeast D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser has proposed.

The City Council in the days ahead will consider her latest $700 million or so plan to try to improve medical services for some of the poorest residents in the city by working with Howard, its medical school — one of the main training institutions for black doctors — George Washington University Hospital and two big health systems, Adventist and Universal Health Systems.

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Concern rises over bias in race-based algorithms for medical decision-making

June 23, 2020, 12:44 pm

≫ Next: Virginia gynecologist’s fraud trial surfaces hundreds of mistreatment claims

≪ Previous: New hospitals may offer hope to D.C.’s poor, minority areas as Covid-19 rages

High-tech wizards may be pushing medicine into a brave new world where important medical decisions rely on supposedly data-driven findings that also may be rooted in an old malignancy: discrimination against black patients.

A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine warns that race-based tools and formulas, algorithms aimed to assist doctors in speeding up their diagnosis and treatment in such areas as heart disease, cancer, and kidney and maternity care, improperly steer blacks away from therapies commonly given to whites without sound reasons, the New York Times reported:

“The tools are often digital calculators on web sites of medical organizations or — in the case of assessing kidney function — actually built into the tools commercial labs use to calculate normal values of blood tests. They assess risk and potential outcomes based on formulas derived from population studies and modeling that looked for variables associated with different outcomes. ‘These tests are woven into the fabric of medicine,’ said Dr. David Jones, the paper’s senior author, a Harvard historian who also teaches ethics to medical students. ‘Despite mounting evidence that race is not a reliable proxy for genetic difference, the belief that it is has become embedded, sometimes insidiously, within medical practice,’ he wrote.”

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Virginia gynecologist’s fraud trial surfaces hundreds of mistreatment claims

October 20, 2020, 5:45 am

≫ Next: Gynecologist guilty on U.S. charges, but questions linger about his practices

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A Virginia criminal case, while focusing on claims of fraud against the federal government, also has exposed a long-running and nightmarish pattern of what prosecutors assert has been a Chesapeake gynecologist’s rampant mistreatment of his patients, many of them women of color and poor.

Dr. Javaid Perwaiz is on trial because authorities say he “manipulated records to cover crimes that enriched him but endangered pregnancies, sterilized women unnecessarily, and pressured them into needless procedures to finance his lavish lifestyle,” the Washington Post reported.

The newspaper’s articles, as well as the efforts by the FBI and federal prosecutors to develop the charges against the jailed specialist, raise disturbing questions about not only Virginia medical regulators but also the hospitals where the gynecologist practiced and colleagues who have described a “frenzied environment in which hospital staff struggled to keep pace with Perwaiz as he rushed from procedure to procedure.”

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Gynecologist guilty on U.S. charges, but questions linger about his practices

November 20, 2020, 1:43 pm

≫ Next: Heartfelt words from prominent moms on losing their pregnancies

≪ Previous: Virginia gynecologist’s fraud trial surfaces hundreds of mistreatment claims

A federal criminal case concluded with felony convictions for a Virginia gynecologist. But the questions are only now beginning as to how a doctor could have caused so many women so much harm for so long without other clinicians, hospitals, administrators, insurers, and regulators stepping in to stop him.

As the Washington Post reported, jurors took 2½ days to convict Dr. Javaid Perwaiz on 52 counts in what prosecutors alleged was his years of defrauding insurance companies by performing life-altering hysterectomies and other unneeded surgeries on women patients. He is scheduled to be sentenced in March, facing a maximum sentence of 465 years imprisonment.

His conduct, condemned and proven by prosecutors in a trial that ran for weeks, included “performing diagnostic procedures with broken equipment and scaring patients into surgery by falsely claiming they had cancer,” the newspaper reported, adding:

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Heartfelt words from prominent moms on losing their pregnancies

November 30, 2020, 1:20 pm

≫ Next: A study finds black babies survive better when treated by black doctors

≪ Previous: Gynecologist guilty on U.S. charges, but questions linger about his practices

Two women with significant star power have opened up to the public about a rarely discussed experience — that, even in contemporary times, pregnancies do not all go well and that parents who lose a pre-term child suffer a shattering grief that others should recognize and seek to help them with.

It may be a sad symptom of social media and celebrity itself that controversy and criticism also has greeted the deeply personal disclosures by Chrissy Teigen, a superstar model, chef, and wife of acclaimed entertainer John Legend, and Meghan Markle, aka the Duchess of Sussex, and the American-born actress and biracial wife of Britain’s Prince Harry.

Markle wrote a heart-felt Op-Ed for the New York Times, describing the overpowering sadness she and her husband shared after she miscarried their second child:

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A study finds black babies survive better when treated by black doctors

January 22, 2021, 6:40 am

≫ Next: Virginia Ob-gyn sentenced to 59 years in prison for harming patients and ripping off insurers

≪ Previous: Heartfelt words from prominent moms on losing their pregnancies

A recent study of deaths among black infants may provide another conscience jab to medical leaders who are confronted with mounting evidence of racial health care disparities in the United States.

As the Washington Post reported, researchers examined records of 1.8 million Florida hospital births between 1992 and 2015, finding in their published study these stark results:

“Although black newborns are three times as likely to die as white newborns, when black babies were cared for by black doctors after birth — primarily pediatricians, neonatologists and family practitioners — their mortality rate was cut in half. They found an association, not a cause and effect, and the researchers said more studies are needed to understand what effect, if any, a doctor’s race might have on infant mortality. ‘Strikingly, these effects appear to manifest more strongly in more complicated cases,’ the researchers wrote, ‘and when hospitals deliver more black newborns.’ They found no similar relationship between white doctors and white births. Nor did they find a difference in maternal death rates when the race of the doctor, usually an obstetrician, was the same as the mother’s.”

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Virginia Ob-gyn sentenced to 59 years in prison for harming patients and ripping off insurers

May 25, 2021, 11:55 am

≪ Previous: A study finds black babies survive better when treated by black doctors

A 70-year-old obstetrician-gynecologist likely will spend the rest of his life in jail. A federal judge sentenced Dr. Javaid Perwaiz to 59 years’ imprisonment for a decade-long spree of enriching himself by practicing costly, unneeded, and harmful medicine on women in the Hampton Roads, Virginia, area.

As the Washington Post reported of the heinous acts that prosecutors proved at trial that Perwaiz committed:

“Several of [his] former patients testified that he performed procedures and surgeries they did not need — and that in some cases left them with permanent physical damage — so that he could collect their insurance money. Prosecutors said he gave his patients unnecessary, irreversible hysterectomies; improper sterilizations; and other procedures, including regular dilation and curettages that he called ‘annual cleanouts’ … The doctor would perform diagnostic procedures with broken equipment, prosecutors said, and scare patients into surgery by telling them they had cancer when they did not.”

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