Thursday, May 27, 2010

Doc offers hope to expectant moms with heart ailment

Doctor Gives Hope To Pregnant Women With Heart Condition

Dr. Dianne Zwicke coaches ob/gyns through providing care to the highest-risk of obstetric patients: those with pulmonary hypertension. With a maternal mortality rate of 40-60%, most women are advised to immediately abort. But Zwicke has seen 40 patients and their babies safely through. By conventional medical wisdom, between 16 and 24 of her patients (and all of their unborn babies) should have died. Zwicke's management has saved between 56 and 64 lives.

17 comments:

OperationCounterstrike said...

Pulmonary hypertension can be mild or severe. For some mild cases, there's a reasonable chance the patient will survive pregnancy and childbirth. For most cases, and virtually all severe cases, it's too dangerous, and abortion is indicated.

Young Christian Woman said...

Christina, thank you for publishing and publicizing this information! You are a great champion for life--and also for "real choice"--making sure that women know there are alternatives to abortion. I will definitely remember this if I or someone I know is ever faced with pulmonary hypertension in pregnancy.

Christina Dunigan said...

OC, if you're for choice, you should also be for the choice of the woman to get help continuing a risky pregnancy if she loves and wants her baby.

OperationCounterstrike said...

Christina, I do support the patient's right to continue a life-threatening pregnancy if she wants. I also support the right of cancer patients to die without medical care if they prefer not to see a doctor for their cancer. No one want to FORCE you to see a doctor if you don't want to. Just don't whine if you die or get maimed in childbirth.

But if a doctor fails to inform you that your pregnancy is life-threatening, that's malpractise. And if a doc tells you (s)he thinks (s)he can make it safe for someone with severe pulmonary hypertension to give birth, that's quackery.

Christina Dunigan said...

I agree the doc has to inform the patient of the risks. For example, telling patients that the current research notes a 40-60% maternal mortality rate, typically due to postpartum decompensation (because the odds of the baby surviving is also a piece of important information for the mom; after all, she's interested in continuing the pregnancy in order to avoid her baby's death). But also, "So far I haven't lost a patient." The patient would need to understand that this management regimen is experimental, and whether the success rate could be due to the patient selection process or some factor other than the doctor having found the elusive effective treatment for pregnancy-concurrent pulmonary hypertension.

OperationCounterstrike said...

You mean "So far I haven't lost a patient BECAUSE I ONLY TAKE MILD CASES".

Christina Dunigan said...

She has taken at least one patient whose doctor advised her to abort. So clearly either there are doctors advising abortion for mild conditions, or this doctor does treat severe cases.

OperationCounterstrike said...

Probably a borderline case. There are always borderline cases in illnesses of varying severity, you know.

OperationCounterstrike said...

Can your readers count on you to report it if one of her patients dies? Will that go into the "Cemetary of Choice"?

Christina Dunigan said...

Her patients KNOW they're undergoing something risky. The women who die at the hands of your buddies do so thinking they're as safe as they'd be in their beds at home.

OperationCounterstrike said...

And for the most part, abortion patients ARE as safe as they'd be in their beds at home. You just select the disasters and huff and puff over them. But for every abortion-disaster you post, there are thousands of successful, uneventful abortions done on thousands of grateful patients.

If I had more time, I could set up a website called "real-in-bed-at-home.com" which would list all the people who die of heart attacks in bed. I'd probably have more cases on that site than you have on yours.

Christina Dunigan said...

If you think you're just as safe having a receptionist administer general anesthesia to you as you are sleeping a natural sleep in your bed at home, you have some serious shortcomings in the judgment department. In fact,

OperationCounterstrike said...

What are you talking about, "general anaesthesia"??? Unless you're doing an extremely rare late-term procedure, abortions are done under twighlight sedation. General anaesthesia is only used in very unusual cases.

Maybe you know what you're talking about with that last comment but I sure don't.

And lying in bed doesn't mean you're safe. People have heart attacks while lying in bed every day, every hour. You could start a web site about them, call it real-lying-in-bed.com.

Christina Dunigan said...

Generally, if you have a heart attack while lying in bed, it's not because somebody perforated your internal organs and let you bleed out.

Why don't you compare the rate at which people get their bowels punctured while just snoozing in their beds with how often women get their bowels punctured while on the abortion table?

OperationCounterstrike said...

Those two rates are not very different.

The death rate from abortion is about one per hundred thousand. I don't know the death rate for lying in bed, but the death rate for giving a patient a shot of penicillin is MORE THAN one per hundred thousand.

OperationCounterstrike said...

Of course, the REALLY appropriate comparison is the death rate from abortion vs the death rate from childbirth.

Childbirth is approx. ten times more likely to kill you than abortion. That's in the industrialized world. Approx. one in ten thousand die in childbirth.

See, for instance, here:

http://www.annals.org/content/140/8/620.short

Christina Dunigan said...

You indicated that a young, healthy pregnant woman is safer on the abortion table than she is asleep in her own bed. Where are your stats?

And you're forgetting that there are TWO people involved when a woman is pregnant. I realize that you consider a live baby to be a negative outcome, but your typical woman choosing to carry to term would beg to differ with you and would consider her baby's survival to be a positive outcome, even if she herself perishes. Whereas in an abortion, if she dies, there is NO survivor.

And we can get into what a crock of unmitigated bullshit CDC abortion mortality statistics are, but you'll just spew your usual spittle, and your bogus NARAL talking points.