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High risk pregnancy

[00:00:00] So the term high risk pregnancy, I actually find very distressing and a little bit triggering. It doesn't mean that there are not pregnancies that are not at risk for certain things, but when patients say to me, so am I high risk? I like to describe to them that I look at each patient as a different entity and each patient has a different set of issues that we may need to address. 

Some of them might be very physical. Some of them might be very emotional, some of them might be very logistic. For example, you might have a history of hypertension and therefore you're at risk for preeclampsia. We have to watch you differently. You might have twins, which puts you at certain issues. You might be very physically, completely healthy, and emotionally you have had a lot of medical complications with regard to your mood history, and that's a different. 

So there are many different reasons. It might be a matter of where you're coming from because you work all day in the city and coming to see us in Connecticut is gonna be a different set of issues. So every patient has different issues. I don't like to use the term high-risk pregnancy because again, I think it labels people and acts as if you are at high, high risk of something tragic happening, when in fact each of us [00:01:00] has a different set of risk issues. 

The reason I bring it up is also because words like maternal fetal. Specialist is the exact same thing as a perinatologist, is the exact same thing as a high risk OB doctor. And when you hear the term high-risk ob, then you're going to see them for your routine ultrasounds. You think that means there's something wrong when in reality many of us send all of our patients to the mfm, A K a perinatologist, AKA a high-risk specialists because they do the best ultrasounds. 

In my opinion, that's how I feel.