A former Virginia OB/GYN has been found guilty of performing unnecessary hysterectomies and other surgeries in an elaborate scheme to scam insurance companies.
Javaid Perwaiz, who was arrested last October, faces up to 465 years in prison. An FBI investigation discovered that the doctor falsely claimed his patients had cancer as a tactic to scare them into having surgery. He often performed the procedures using broken equipment. Perwaiz falsified pregnant women’s medical charts to induce their deliveries early on days he was scheduled to work. Agents also found that he illegally backdated Medicaid consent forms for sterilization procedures. The scam was discovered to have been going on since at least 2010, although given that he has practiced for nearly four decades, it is likely that the despicable acts went on for much longer.
The 70-year-old had a criminal past unbeknownst to his hundreds of patients. He was convicted of felony tax fraud in the 1990s. More shockingly, the Virginia Board of Medicine only disciplined him for poor note-taking after being terminated from a hospital for allegedly performing 11 hysterectomies without reason. It is unclear why the man was not stripped of his license and prosecuted then. Nurses who worked at hospitals with the doctor even said that they complained multiple times to supervisors to no avail.
“Doctors are in positions of authority and trust and take an oath to do no harm to their patients,” Karl Schumann, acting special agent in charge of the FBI’s Norfolk field office, said in a statement. “With unnecessary, invasive medical procedures, Dr. Perwaiz not only caused enduring complications, pain and anxiety to his patients, but he assaulted the most personal part of their lives and even robbed some of their future.”
“I’m glad that he can’t do it to anyone else,” said 53-year-old Karen Lane, a longtime patient who was not mentioned in the court documents. Perwaiz removed her uterus and ovaries when she was just in her early 30s. The woman said that the FBI never called her back concerning her complaint. Malpractice lawyers also turned down her case due to the surgeries being done too long ago.
“But . . . I still feel left out, like he didn’t get anything for what he did to me,” Lane said. “I still feel like he got away with it for me. I don’t think anything is going to really make it better.”
Another patient who was not named in the case, Brittni DuPuy-German, was just 29-years-old when Perwaiz performed a hysterectomy on her, which left her with complications, including chronic pain.
“At least it’s done; he is found guilty,” she said. “It kind of hits you, like, this is real, this did happen.”
Perwaiz was found guilty of 52 of the 61 counts that were brought up against him. He will be sentenced on March 31st.
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