The Preventionist - Trailer

It's August 2023, a county government meeting in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. A young woman, early 20s, steps up to the mic to speak.
She's got a story to tell. She has five minutes.

My two-month-old son was happily drinking milk from his bottle when he quickly started choking, turned blue, and went limp.

My boyfriend transported our son to the changing table as I grabbed an anti-choking device, and my boyfriend began assembling it.

I never ran so fast up the stairs, screaming at the top of my lungs for help. My father rushed downstairs and immediately started doing chest compressions as I dialed 911.

Two pumps of the device and my son was conscious gasping for air and coughing up milk. It worked.
Thank God, they thought. The whole family.

Mother, father, grandparents, they all went to the ER to make sure the baby was okay. We saved his life that night.

But upon arriving at Lehigh Valley Hospital, the diagnosis quickly became something so different, something nobody could have ever prepared me for. It turned out one of the doctors had a theory.

She stated to my father and mother-in-law that we are young first-time parents who got frustrated with our baby and violently shook him to make him stop crying.

And a confession would only make things easier for us. The parents were told to leave the hospital without their son and he wouldn't come home for seven whole months.

I'm a 21-year-old mother who watched her child

Her first child meet milestones over FaceTime.

I'm a postpartum mom dealing with with the grief and the trauma of my son being ripped from my arms. And I'm a mom who lost everything in less than 24 hours due to one doctor's misdiagnosis.

Enough is enough.

And then the next person speaks. And the next one.

The stories they tell form a pattern. of parents walking into a Lehigh Valley hospital to get help for a child, only to leave without them.

Instead of looking into the issues our daughter was having that led us to the hospital in the first place, they saw a small bruise and immediately wanted to paint a picture.

I was stunned at every turn and kept repeating to myself, this can't possibly be true. This can't really be happening.
Someone will see this is wrong and someone will stop it. But it didn't happen.

We lost custody of our son for four months with no investigation. The woman who had never met us or our son simply decided that he fit her criteria.

For two hours, they spoke. They were bewildered, outraged.
This is abuse.

We are traumatized. We are afraid of doctors now.
I'm afraid of doctors now.

The families blamed one hospital network, and the same doctor's name kept coming up again and again. A pediatrician.

I ask you, what kind of doctor does this?

That's what I wanted to know too.

From Serial Productions and the New York Times, I'm Diane Neary, Neary, and this is The Preventionist, a story about a doctor and the rise of a powerful field of pediatric medicine.

All episodes are out now, wherever you get your podcasts.