Gynecology Category Archives — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

May 25, 2021

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

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.”

April 28, 2021

Heavy marijuana use by pregnant women can harm babies, big California study finds

by Patrick A. Malone

Although most states, including most recently Virginia, have eased restrictions on the recreational or medical use of marijuana, expectant moms should take note of serious studies that show pot, especially in heavy consumption, isn’t great for the health of unborn babies.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego examined a decade of medical records of 5 million or so women in the Golden State, carefully comparing those who used marijuana heavily versus those who did not. Their results, published in a scientific journal, offered a warning, as NBC News reported:

“Babies born to women who were heavy cannabis users during pregnancy are more likely to have health problems, including premature birth and death within a year of birth, compared to babies born to women who did not use cannabis during pregnancy.”

March 30, 2021

USC to pay $1.1 billion to settle gynecologist’s hundreds of sex abuse cases

by Patrick A. Malone

The University of Southern California apparently has set a record — one which parents should pray no college has reason to challenge and for which the educators and leaders at the Los Angeles campus should be sorry and ashamed.

The Trojans have announced they will pay $1.1 billion to settle lawsuits over the tawdry actions of Dr. George Tyndall, who was the lone gynecologist for young women treated in the student health service.

The school has admitted that he saw 17,000 patients in his three decades at the school and sexually abused many of them. As the Los Angeles Times reported:

January 12, 2021

Rich investors buy up MD practices and seek to strip patient safeguards

by Patrick A. Malone

Wealthy investors want to enrich themselves yet more, partly by pushing doctors to oust patients from their practices unless they sign away invaluable constitutional rights. These rights can protect them if they are harmed while receiving medical services.

Patients’ safeguards, however, too often vanish when businesses compel customers to sign on to “forced arbitration,” Bloomberg Businessweek reported, noting that this consumer menace is rising in medicine as hedge funds buy up physician groups. Rich investors see lucrative profits in these practices, particularly in specialties like dermatology, gastroenterology, and obstetrics.

It seems that doctors like practicing medicine and dislike the billing, managing, paper shuffling, and other bureaucratic aspects of their profession, the story reported. Some aren’t good at it. Many are struggling, especially as the coronavirus pandemic has slashed patient demand for all kinds of medical procedures, sending doctors’ revenues plummeting. As Bloomberg reported:

November 25, 2020

UC offers $73-million settlement in class-action suit over abusive gynecologist

by Patrick A. Malone

The University of California has offered to pay $73 million to settle with 5,000 women their class-action lawsuit asserting a staff gynecologist sexually abused them during medical procedures. This is yet another big case involving claims of years of widespread and sordid professional misconduct that somehow went undetected at a major institution, which has acknowledged it reacted poorly when confronted with a problematic clinician.

The proposed settlement still requires the sign-off of a federal judge, and it may not go through if more plaintiffs decide against joining this deal, as lawyers in Los Angeles have said they will not.

James Heaps, 67, a one-time gynecologist who is at the center of the scandal at UCLA, also still faces criminal charges for his actions during his 1983-2019 career at the university, in its student health center and at its medical center. The Los Angeles Times reported that the doctor was first arrested in June 2019 for sexually touching two patients in 2017. But then:

November 20, 2020

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

by Patrick A. Malone

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:

October 20, 2020

Virginia gynecologist’s fraud trial surfaces hundreds of mistreatment claims

by Patrick A. Malone

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.”

June 23, 2020

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

by Patrick A. Malone

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.”

May 28, 2020

Buyer beware: J&J pulls its baby powder, as officials warn about vapeware

by Patrick A. Malone

Consumers have gotten stark reminders of the safety risks of two different kinds of products, one a household classic and the other a bootlegger’s nightmare. Caveat emptor about baby powder and street-purchased vaping devices.

As for Johnson and Johnson’s family familiar talc, the company may have timed well its decision to yank it from shelves in North America as the public focuses its attention on other and major health concerns, experts said. As Reuters reported:

“Christie Nordhielm, a professor of marketing at Georgetown, said it appears J&J made its decision to withdraw from the market while consumers were preoccupied with the pandemic. ‘It’s a nice time to quietly do it,’ she said, adding ‘it will minimize the reputational hit.’”

March 25, 2020

For 70+ women and their MDs, more reasons to rethink routine mammograms

by Patrick A. Malone

As Americans live longer, clinicians may need to reconsider whether they need to subject older patients to routine screenings that may trigger even more costly, invasive, painful, and unnecessary medical testing and procedures. For women 70 and older, for example, yet more new evidence raises doubts about mammograms designed to detect breast cancers.

As the New York Times reported, researchers in Boston examined 2000-2008 Medicare claims “to follow more than one million women, ages 70 to 84, who had undergone a mammogram.” Quoting Dr. Xabier Garcia-Albéniz, an oncologist and epidemiologist at RTI Health Solutions and lead author of a new observational study of their women subjects:

“They had never had breast cancer and had a ‘high probability,’ based on their medical histories, of living at least 10 more years. ‘That’s the population who will reap the benefit of screening,’ Dr. Garcia-Albéniz said, because it takes 10 years for mammography to show reduced mortality. The researchers divided the subjects into two groups: one that stopped screening, and another that continued having mammograms at least every 15 months. They found that mammograms provided a survival benefit, if a modest one, for women ages 70 to 74. In line with previous research, the study found that annually screening 1,000 women in that age group would result, after 10 years, in one less death from breast cancer. But among the women who were 75 to 84, annual mammograms did not reduce deaths, although they did, predictably, detect more cancer than in the group that discontinued screening. ‘You’re diagnosing more cancer, but that’s not translating to a mortality benefit,’ Dr. Garcia-Albéniz said.”