Articles Posted in Medical Malpractice

Pregnancy, labor, and delivery are high-risk times for both mother and baby. Obstetricians, gynecologists, and others who provide treatment to pregnant women face some of the highest risks of being sued for medical malpractice. When injuries occur during pregnancy or delivery, the consequences can be grave and the losses great. One recent tragic case showed how medical negligence can result in the loss of a young life and a large jury verdict for grieving family members left behind.

If you or someone you love is victimized by medical mistakes during pregnancy or when a baby is being delivered, it is important to get legal advice from an Atlanta birth injury attorney as soon as possible. Birth injuries can sometimes necessitate costly medical care for a child's entire life, and an attorney can help you to get the money you need to provide that care. If the mistakes result in the death of mother or baby, an attorney can also assist in these tragic situations.

Consequences of Medical Mistakes During Pregnancy

Having a baby is supposed to be a joyous occasion for a family. Tragically, for some families, the birth of a new child does not result in a happy growing family but instead results in death of the mother, the infant, or both. The New York Times reported recently on one tragic case in which a mother died in a hospital after giving birth. The article not only shared that mother’s story, but also illustrated the problem of rising maternal mortality rates throughout the United States.

When a mother or baby dies in childbirth, surviving family members are left without loved ones. Financial and emotional damage result from these tragedies. An Atlanta medical malpractice lawyer should be consulted by victims and their families to understand what their legal rights are.

While nothing can bring back the lost loved ones, obtaining compensation can hold doctors and hospitals accountable and help families to cover medical costs and other financial damages.

In the field of medicine, some things are simply not supposed to happen. The mistakes which it is unreasonable for a doctor to make are called “never events.Unfortunately, never events happen very frequently, including one recent case reported on by CNN in which a doctor took a kidney out of the wrong patient.

When a “never eventoccurs, the very nature of the mistake is sufficient to show the doctor who made the error was unreasonably negligent. Victims who suffered injury due to this negligence can pursue a civil case for medical malpractice.

An Atlanta medical negligence lawyer can provide assistance to victims in understanding their legal options and maximizing their compensation when they have been harmed.

Currently, there are around 570 clinics throughout the United States which promise patients they can reduce pain, improve healing, and high all sorts of serious medical conditions including serious illnesses such as Alzheimer's and muscular dystrophy. These clinics tell consumers they can fix their serious health issues through the use of stem cell therapy. According to Scientific American, around 351 U.S. companies are marketing these stem cell clinics directly to consumers. The problem is, their marketing materials may be dishonest, and the clinics themselves often cannot actually live up to the hype. In a worst-case scenario, the clinics actually cause harm instead of helping.

How can this happen? The issue is the stem cell clinics currently fall into a regulatory grey area and the federal government needs to do more to ensure these clinics are safe. The Food and Drug Administration has already issued draft guidance aimed at improving regulatory efforts, and there has been extensive demand by interested parties to provide comments on the FDA's proposal. It is not yet clear, though, if the FDA will actually be able to move forward with the new rules which would make reigning in stem cell clinics possible by giving the FDA authority to regulate them in a similar way to the FDA's regulation of biological drugs.

Regardless of what the FDA does or doesn't do, anyone who receives treatment at a stem cell clinic should know his or her rights in case a problem occurs. An Atlanta medical malpractice lawyer can provide assistance in pursuing a case to get compensation if something goes wrong and a stem cell therapy clinic causes harm.

Stent are metal mesh devices implanted with catheters that open up clogged blood vessels, and they have been implanted into seven million patients in the last ten years, with researchers saying as many as 1/3 of those stents being unnecessary. Eleven hospitals across the US have now settled civil allegations of needless stenting and wrongdoing. Our Atlanta medical malpractice attorneys have been following this issue, and saw a case of a Georgia catheterization clinic, or “cath lab, that harmed and even caused the death of patients without the hospital taking any steps.

The instance in Georgia involved Judi Gary, who was a patient at Satilla Regional Medical Center in Waycross, Georgia, in 2005. Najam Azmat attempted to put a catheter in Ms. Gary to put in a stent in an artery which supplies blood to the pelvis and right leg. Nurses in the room, including Evan Gourley, saw blood on the x-ray monitor. When this was pointed out, Azmat claimed there was nothing wrong. Gourley left in disgust after the nurses requested a different vascular surgeon step in, which was refused. It turned out that Azmat had tore Ms. Gary’s aorta. Gourley went to the administrators of the hospital, who had apparently already received seven such reports about Azmat, but they continued to let Azmat work. And one of his later patients died.

Ruth Minter was at Satilla in January 2006 when Azmat attempted to put a stent in an artery near one of her kidneys. He punctured the wall of the kidney in the process and Ms. Minter died 17 days later after massive blood loss. Perhaps worst of all, in a review of the case it was found Ms. Minter didn’t even need the stent that, in addition to Azmat’s negligence, cost her her life. A surgeon who reviewed her case for a lawsuit filed by her family against Azmat and the hospital said, “People who should have and could have saved Mrs. Minter’s life were too interested in having Dr. Azmat continue to do procedures and make money for the hospital to do the right thing.Research into the Satilla Regional Medical Center show the efforts that hospital administrators went to to keep their cath lab open, even in the face of untold patient injuries.

Our medical malpractice lawyers have recently discussed several medical malpractice issues on this blog, and we noticed yet another Georgia case that caught our attention. The family of a DeKalb County man was awarded $17 million for the malpractice of a physician's assistant that caused the brain injuries of their son.

What happened to 24-year-old Sheriod Merritt is a tragic story. In 2008, when he was 19-years-old, he was shot in the face by a stray bullet from a drive by shooting outside a Wal-Mart in Lovejoy. He was shot through the cheek and could speak, and his mother said he appeared fine just after the shooting. The wound was determined not life-threatening. Merritt was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital where the doctors told the family he would be okay after surgery, and when he woke up he could be taken home to recover. The young man was apparently very anxious about the surgery and told his father that he loved him before being taken away. When Patrick and Angela Merritt came to pick up their son the next day, he was in a coma. They claim the doctors never told them what happened to Sheriod during the surgery or what went wrong. All they knew was that their son, who was still talking and walking the day before even after being shot, had suffered some kind of brain trauma and could hardly speak and could not walk anymore.

The Merritt's turned to the legal system to try to get answers about their son. The case was tried in the DeKalb County State Court with Judge Wayne Purdom. In their lawsuit, the family alleged that the anesthesiologist, Dr. James Richardson, from Emory University Hospital and a physician's assistant, Richard Nardi, at Grady Hospital, didn't follow proper procedure when Sheriod was waking up after his surgery. The family says a preventable error with his breathing tube caused Sheriod to go without oxygen for seven to eight minutes, causing the brain damage. The hospital contends that Sheriod woke from the anesthesia violently, fighting with medical personnel, at which point he dislodged his own breathing tube. The statement said the medical personnel were only doing their job by acting quickly in order to save Sheriod's life.

Victims of medical malpractice who file lawsuits against doctors will often end up dealing with malpractice insurance providers. Unfortunately, these medical malpractice insurers sometimes fail to live up to their obligations. Insurers could offer low settlements and try to deprive Atlanta malpractice victims of compensation they deserve, or could even deny claims which should be paid out. In one recent case, the behavior of the insurers was so egregious the insurance company was ordered to pay plaintiffs $13 million in punitive damages as well as compensation for actual malpractice losses, resulting in a total verdict of more than $14 million.

Victims of malpractice clearly cannot count on insurers to do the right thing and make payments when tremendous losses occur. Victims, however, do have options and can receive significant compensation when juries decide insurers act unfairly after doctors cause harm. An Atlanta birth injury lawyer can provide invaluable legal assistance in cases where medical negligence occurs. Our attorneys can deal with insurers on behalf of patients and can explore all possible legal grounds for maximizing compensation after losses.

Insurer’s Bad Faith Leads to Multi-Million Dollar Verdict in Medical Malpractice Case

The Institute of Medicine released a report entitled "Improving Diagnosis in Health Care,which contains some troubling statistics on the rates of misdiagnosis in American medicine. Researchers preparing the report lamented the fact that there have been inadequate studies done on misdiagnosis, so there is not enough information to assess the impact of this type of error on patient outcomes. However, even with the limited data that has become available on diagnostic errors, it is clear that misdiagnosis of medical conditions is a major problem within the American medical care system.

Misdiagnosis can lead to an Atlanta medical malpractice claim. Patients whose conditions are diagnosed incorrectly could experience delays in treatment as their conditions become worse and sometimes incurable. An inaccurate diagnosis could also cause harm to patients who receive the wrong treatment.

An Atlanta misdiagnosis attorney should be consulted when any mistakes in diagnosis are made that cause a condition to worsen or that result in economic and/or non-financial loss to patients.

A recent study, as reported in the Washington Post, showed that errors in diagnosing patients is the main source of medical malpractice claims. This study, lead by Dr. David Newman-Toker, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Ali Saber Tehrani, looked into 25 years of malpractice payments to discover this fact. The researchers looked into 350,000 medical malpractice claims in which payment was made from 1986 until 2010.

What they mean by diagnostic errors are things like diagnosing appendicitis when the patient has an ectopic pregnancy or diagnosing simple dizziness when the patient is having a brainstem stroke. Often the correct diagnosis is eventually arrived at, but not until the condition is more complicated to treat and has possibly disabled the patient. The study did not delve into why diagnostic errors were so common, but Dr. Newman-Toker said that diagnosis is a difficult and imprecise process and there is often a time lapse between the mistake and when it is discovered, making it also harder to correct in enough time to make a difference. There are also no public reporting requirements for these types of mistakes.

Dr. Newman-Toker said, “Diagnostic errors are the most common, the most costly and the most deadly of all medical errors.They accounted for 29 percent of successful malpractice claims and 35 percent of the total money paid out. Incorrect, missed, or delayed diagnosis also caused 39 percent of malpractice deaths. Other categories of medical mistakes listed were treatment errors and surgical mishaps, the other two largest categories of malpractice claims, and obstetric problems, medication errors, and anesthesia errors.