Medical Malpractice

• Routine procedure turned deadly

  Jeremy Thurman | February 09, 2006 2:42 PM | 0 CommentsNew York City, NY

  Nancy and Shelby Medlin took their healthy 3-year old son, Max, to the hospital for a routine outpatient dental procedure. Due to his young age, Max was anesthetized. Soon after Max awoke, Nancy knew something was terribly wrong with her baby. The staff tried to tell her that she was just an overly paranoid mother, but she know better and persisted in trying to get quality care for her son. Four...

• Cadaver Parts Scandal Expected to Ignite Lawsuits

  Denise A. Rubin | January 26, 2006 2:26 PM | 0 CommentsNew York City, NY

  A large-scale scheme in which body parts were removed from corpses and sold to hospitals is likely to touch off numerous lawsuits. Patients that received skin grafts and other surgeries are worried about contracting infectious diseases from the illegal practice. Funeral homes in the NY area are facing criminal investigations. At least one woman claims to have contracted syphilis from a bone...

• Group Urges Hospitals to Avoid Drug Errors

  Denise A. Rubin | January 26, 2006 2:22 PM | 0 CommentsNew York City, NY

  The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations issued a report that urges hospitals to highlight medications on patient charts in order to avoid medication reconciliation errors. The group estimates that mistakes involving drug mix-ups result in at least 7,000 deaths a year and that about 63 percent are due to communication errors. An alert sent by the organization advocating...

• Caps don't work

  Jeremy Thurman | January 12, 2006 11:18 AM | 0 CommentsNew York City, NY

  A study published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute ("AEI") in August 2005 shows that capping contigent fees isn't help accomplish tort reform. In fact they found just the opposite. The AEI study found that contingent fees: 1. Give wares and incentive to screen cases and weed out the "frivolous" ones2. Motivate lawyers to win3. Improve access to the Courts for low-income...

• Doctors the third leading cause of death in the US?

  Jeremy Thurman | January 04, 2006 2:15 PM | 1 CommentNew York City, NY

  Do you know what the term iatrogenic means? is defined as "induced in a patient by a physician's activity, manner, or therapy. Used especially to pertain to a complication of treatment." In the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), a Dr. Starfield has documented an estimation of how many iatrogenic caused deaths occur each year. His report shows that 106,000 deaths are the...

• More Facts About Tort Reform

  Jeremy Thurman | January 04, 2006 10:25 AM | 0 CommentsNew York City, NY

  With a new wave of tort reform initiatives sweeping the country this year, I keep hearing about "Texas size" reforms. Of course, Texas is suppose to be the model for tort reform, however, it has done nothing more than abrogate the rights of injured persons. Here is an article I found that further illustrates that neither claims nor jury verdicts account for spike in malpractice insurance. The...

• Cause of Brachial Plexus Injury

  Staff Writer | January 02, 2006 7:40 PM | 0 CommentsNew York City, NY

  The most recent edition of the textbook Child Neurology has just been published. Child Neurology is arguably the most authoritative textbook of pediatric neurology. The just published 7th edition debunks the myth, asserted repeatedly in the obstetrical literature, that most brachial plexus injuries occur in utero.The textbook states that "whatever scant evidence exists for a classical brachial...

• U.S. Health Care Most Expensive & Most Error Prone

  Jeremy Thurman | December 30, 2005 10:44 AM | 1 CommentNew York City, NY

  Not only do Americans pay much more for medical treatment than anyone else in the world, they also bear the brunt of the most medical errors, according to a survey covering the USA, Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Almost 7,000 patients were consulted.The survey supported by The Commonwealth Fund finds that one-third of U.S. patients with health problems reported...

• Heart Attack Drugs Often Misprescribed

  Jeremy Thurman | December 29, 2005 11:53 AM | 0 CommentsNew York City, NY

  Emergency room doctors treating heart attack patients often fail to administer powerful clot-preventing drugs in the proper doses, a new study finds.One common error is to overprescribe -- giving doses large enough to cause potentially dangerous bleeding, according to researchers reporting in the Dec. 28 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

• Family Doctor or Specialist for Serious Problems?

  Jeremy Thurman | December 29, 2005 10:56 AM | 0 CommentsNew York City, NY

  A while back, I did a deposition of a family physician. The deposition was regarding a cardiovascular disease. During the deposition, I began to ask the family physician general questions regarding the symptomology of the disease and what signs she would look at to diagnose the patient that they had this cardiovascular disease. To my amazement, the good doctor could only name one of about 7...