IG special agent recounts case of Virginia doctor imprisoned for performing unneeded surgeries

An alarming and egregious case of a doctor putting profits over patients is centered on Virginia and an OB-GYN who charmed his way into families’ lives only to perform needless surgeries that scarred women forever, often at taxpayer expense.“It’s one of the worst patient abuse cases I’ve seen,” says Maureen Dixon, a special agent with the Health and Human Services Inspector General, who helped lead the probe that put the doctor in prison.
She says Dr. Javaid Perwaiz was an “institution” in the Virginia area where he practiced for decades, but “unfortunately what he did was take advantage of that trust and violate his sacred oath. And he essentially hurt people from money. He committed healthcare fraud, but worse than that is that he was actually hurting his patients.”
The investigation was sparked by an anonymous nurse’s tip in 2018 about unnecessary surgeries on Medicaid patients. Investigators revealed numerous schemes including early baby deliveries scheduled for Dr. Perwaiz’s convenience and cash.
“He did it so many times, the nurses actually had a term for it. It was called a ‘Perwaiz Special.’ And that unfortunately meant there was an infant who was delivered before 39 weeks who was having some kind of medical situation that required them to either go to the NICU, fluid in their lungs, things of that nature, delivered unnecessarily,” Dixon told me.
“Another area of particular concern would be he would tell a patient that they needed to have a certain organ removed whether it was, say your ovaries. However, when they’d wake up from the surgery, they had a hysterectomy instead. So he would frequently do something different than what the patient consented to.”
Alleged victims included a 33-year-old who consented to cyst removal but woke up to find her ovaries gone. Another patient says she agreed to ovary removal but got a full hysterectomy. Others reportedly suffered bowel punctures, nerve damage, and a child with cerebral palsy after a premature C-section.
Authorities say Dr. Perwaiz told multiple women they had cancer – when they didn’t.
“So to be intentionally scaring people into thinking you have cancer or intentionally misdiagnosing it, is absolutely egregious … . At times, he would say that he was taking a biopsy. However, he wasn’t. Frequently, he was not actually taking biopsies or sending biopsies out to have them viewed. He was just telling you that you had cancer.”
Perwaiz was arrested in 2019. A hotline drew over 500 complaints. In 2020, a jury convicted him on 52 counts, including health care fraud involving the taxpayer-funded programs Medicare and Medicaid. 
He recently lost several appeals and is now serving a 59-year prison sentence.
“Were you able to quantify how much he defrauded the government or insurance programs?” Full Measure asked Dixon.
“We ended up with a restitution amount of about $20 million,” she says. “And while recovering $20 million of taxpayer funds is important, it really pales in comparison to stopping what he was doing to all these patients and women who maybe never will be able to have children because of his actions too.”
For more on this story, watch “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson” Sunday. Attkisson’s most recent bestseller is “Follow the $cience: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails.”

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