“It’s terrifying how the health care system has gone political,” says Dr. Leana Wen, President of Planned Parenthood!
- The President of Planned Parenthood Dr. Leana Wen, 36 spoke to InStyle and talked about how the healthcare system has changed over the years.
- She feels that it has become political and needs a fix.
Dr. Leana Wen and her life-changing event
Dr. Leana Wen was undergoing her medical training when an event changed her life. Her mother had an illness and she was wrongly diagnosed with depression and anxiety.
A year lapsed with her living with this wrong diagnosis. But later, doctors diagnosed Leana’s mother to have cancer. But it was too late. The cancer had metastasized.
Dr. Leana said:
“My mother’s doctors and nurses were trying to do the right thing — nobody goes into the healing profession because we want to do harm to our patients — but something wasn’t working,”
She was able to see the healthcare system from a patient’s perspective. She has been caring for her mother for eight years now and has observed closely how there is a wide disconnect and huge gap between what the healthcare system is doing and what actually the patients are receiving.
Dr. Leana Wen and her career and experiences
Dr. Leana had taken care of victims of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 as an emergency room doctor. She not only provided life-saving and critical care but also educated them about their rights as patients.
Dr. Leana was the health commissioner of Baltimore before. She brought about a huge positive change in the city’s healthcare system. She and her team’s services had a direct great impact on the patient’s life, a feat she is proud of.
Her health Department under her guidance prepared a comprehensive and aggressive plan to prevent overdoses and manage drug addiction. In the year, 2015, she ordered that all Baltimore residents should have prescription access to naloxone which is an antidote for opioid overdose.
The residents with this order could save over 3000 overdose patients in one year. She launched a program where they have free eyeglasses for kids needing them without the need to miss school. Since the fall of 2018, she has been President of Planned Parenthood.
Dr. Leana Wen and her talk with InStyle
Dr. Leana is the first physician in the last 50 years to be head of Planned Parenthood. She had grown without any means and hence Planned Parenthood had helped her, her mother and her sister sustain in life. So her association with them is a long and personal one.
She and her family migrated to the USA in 1989 and sought political asylum. They got their USA citizenship in 2003 and settled in the eastern part of LA. Her parents did multiple jobs at the same time to have a square meal and got help from Medicaid and Planned Parenthood.
Dr. Leana said:
“Planned Parenthood was there to provide the care we needed when we couldn’t find it anywhere else,”
She first made people aware of what Planned Parenthood provides. She said:
“For so many patients who come to us, we are their only source of care. I wanted people to know what they can count on us for.”
Wen said about the current health care system:
“As a doctor, it’s incredibly frustrating and, frankly, terrifying how health care, particularly women’s health care and sexual and reproductive health care, is singled out and politicized,”
She states:
“They are seeking basic, life-saving medical care. Getting vaccinations shouldn’t be political. Getting medicine for your child shouldn’t be political. Birth control shouldn’t be political.”
Her organization is looking at some health problems created by Trump administration. Dr. Leana whose hero is her mother says:
“You have to be fearless. But that comes from figuring out what you stand for and then never letting up, no matter what you face,”
Source: InStyle
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