england

[annegarrett]

Helen,

All valid questions! We thought of that as well--how do we steer people towards or away from doctors. The challenge we face is the laws that govern a nonprofit prohibit us from "advertising" any particular doctor. If we put in a name and then accept money from that doctor the IRS sees it as advertising. So we cannot post names. What we can do is encourage our members to email people directly with suggestions, we recommend the professional groups who specialize in this disease (like APEC in the UK--who then can recommend who is best there and the North American Society for the Study of Hypertension in Pregnancy www.nasshp.org). It's a quandary--no question.

The UK has some of the best doctors in this field and APEC is doing great things.

Take care,



Anne Garrett
Founder/Spokeswoman
Preeclampsia Foundation

[helenw]

Hi Anne, I feel thats all I did, as you can see, the link to the APEC recomended Doctors page with the said doctor was included in the message. Thats why I couldn't understand why the Docs name was deleted.

Yes its a quandry.

Helen

www.pre-eclampsia.co.uk

[laura]

Helen, I'm afraid that is my fault- because of the way we have to do things here, to follow US non-profit laws- I asked the moderators to edit all names in the forum. I realize that things are different over in the UK, and APEC is lucky enough that they can actually name docs, but we can't. Our moderators really are incredible- they really put a lot of effort into providing support and I think they do a great job. To make life easier for them, it is much easier to manage the 5,500 posts per month if we have standard rules across the board. I realize though, that things are indeed different over there!

Laura
Webmaster/Forum Administrator
AK Area Coordinator

Alicia (severe PE) 5/98 ~ Camille (htn, oligo) 4/03
http://www.babiesonline.com/babies/c/camilleandallie/

[annegarrett]

It is the same IRS rule for US as for UK doctors. We get donations from lots of UK doctors (particularly the good ones) and so cannot recommend any names, no matter where they live. The rule is not ours--it is the US law and so it really does tie our hands and I am sure you can appreciate how frustrating that is for us.

Thanks for asking the question--I bet a lot of people were wondering and now they know!

Anne Garrett
Founder/Spokeswoman
Preeclampsia Foundation