Articles Posted in Medical Malpractice

The Maryland Daily Record reports on a Carroll County electrician who was recently awarded $2.3 million in a medical malpractice case by a Baltimore City jury. After a weeklong trial, the jury found the defendant doctor negligent for piercing the plaintiff’s spinal cord during a pain relief procedure.

Steroid Injections at Issue

Doctors have used therapeutic steroid injections for years.  The standard of care requires that any injectable substance that a physician puts into a patient is safe, sterile, and prepared to accepted industry standards. The standard of care also requires the doctor to know where the needle is going in the patients, which should be far removed from the spinal cord itself.

The Maryland State Bar Association annual meeting had a discussion group on a topic entitled, “A Cure for the Courts: Are Health Courts the Rx for Maryland?” The idea behind health courts is that specially trained judges would hear medical malpractice cases in Maryland, without juries present, deciding damages based on “schedules” for non-economic damages.

There are scores of problems with health courts. The most obvious is that the pesky little Seventh Amendment which guarantees a right to a jury. The guiding principle behind citizen juries is regular people deciding what constitutes acceptable behavior and what the damages should be for a person’s injuries. Because medical malpractice cases are frequently catastrophic injury cases, this is all the more reason the community values matter so much in achieving a fair outcome. Government chosen “experts” made specialized health court decisions that do not reflect the values of the local community regarding either liability or damages. The framers of our Constitution feared these kinds of concerns, reflected in the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.

I understand this panel was sparsely attended. This is not surprising. There is virtually no interest in health courts in Maryland, not even from medical malpractice defense lawyers, who you might have thought would have attended this discussion in droves.

Yesterday, an article by Brendan Kearney in the Maryland Daily Record reported on an insurance company’s plan to require its doctors to have patients sign waivers that limit both their rights and the amount of their damages. It starts out like this: “Eugene Rosov is passionate about what he does. ‘I live for this. It is the most important thing on the planet for me,’ Rostov said. ‘Pray God I’m not wrong.’ Was he talking about global warming or the war on terror? Try medical malpractice insurance. Rosov thinks the current method of settling malpractice claims is unfair… and jurors are not educated enough to understand the issues.”

Okay, where do I begin? The most important thing on the planet is medical malpractice policies that require doctors to limit patients’ rights? I’m speechless. Not just does this show a stunning lack of perspective, but it underscores the degree to which our opponents are fighting to limit the rights of medical malpractice victims.

Equally insane is the notion that juries are not smart enough to decide medical malpractice cases. Juries are too stupid to decide whether a doctor has committed medical malpractice, but are smart enough to consider whether the rule of reason should apply to an antitrust case or whether there has been a patent infringement. This stuff is all easy, right? I wonder if Mr. Rosov thinks juries should be able to decide which criminals to put to death.

This is one of the more depressing reports on medical malpractice that you will read. A recent study from Johns Hopkins has found that hospital staff members do not spot the vast majority of errors in pediatric chemotherapy until they have affected the child. According to the study, doctors and other health care providers failed to identify errors in dosage or administration of drugs 85 percent of the time. The figures drastically underestimate the number of errors in treating these sick children. But this does not mean that the child is not impacted by these medical mistakes. Many complications are never attributed back to chemotherapy because the child is so sick and at risk for so many complications.

Chemotherapy patients are vulnerable to these medical mistakes because there is no usual dose. The amount of chemotherapy received usually depends on body weight. Body sizes affect pediatric dosages. Chemotherapy exacerbates the problem because it is practically poison. Coming from someone who has taken chemotherapy, it is poison. For example, if you take three times the amount of OxyContin, you will sleep a little longer than you like, but no actual harm occurs. With chemo, this margin of error does not exist.

The Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer blog specifically avoids being trite or preachy. But let’s put that aside, just for today. Doctors and other health care providers have to be more careful in treating some of the sickest and our most innocent patients.

The Virginian-Pilot had an interesting article (the link is now lost) on Saturday regarding the punishment that the Virginia Board of Medicine gave to a Virginia Beach doctor who had admitted fabricating a patient’s vital signs during minor bunion surgery at Sentara Bayside Hospital. He prewired the oxygen saturation levels and EKG readings before her surgery.  Bunion surgery.  And she is dead.

The reason we know this little shortcut is that the patient, a mother of four boys, suffered catastrophic brain injuries during surgery, slipped into a coma and died.  A mother of four kids for no reason.  How frustrating it must be for the family to experience this tragedy.   They might at least think they would protect someone else’s mother.

Medical malpractice is the country’s third-leading killer behind heart disease and cancer. Decent doctors, who made unintentional medical errors while trying to do the best they could for the patient, cause most of these deaths.

A recent study by the “Journal of General Internal Medicine” found that doctors are loath to admit medical mistakes. Virtually every doctor in the study of 538 doctors surveyed – 97 percent – agreed that they would report a theoretical medical error. But only 41 percent said they had disclosed a minor medical error they made.

Half the doctors surveyed believe they have never made even a minor medical mistake. “It seems fair to assume that all of us have made at least a minor error, if not a major error, sometime in our careers,” Dr. Lauris Kaldjian, a University of Iowa professor of internal medicine said, stating the obvious to the Kansas City Star.

This study conjures up memories of the doctor Alec Baldwin’s character Jed Hill pretended to be in the movie “Malice”. Do this many doctors really believe they have never made even a minor mistake in their entire careers?

[I updated this post in 2020 with Baltimore-area shoulder dystocia verdicts and settlements at the bottom of this post.]

A Baltimore jury yesterday found a doctor responsible for the brain injury and death in 2003 in a shoulder dystocia case and awarded the child’s parents $8.1 million. The damages are limited to just over $2.1 million under Maryland law putting a cap on awards for pain and suffering.

During the delivery of the child at Mercy Hospital, the child’s shoulders became stuck in the birth canal. This condition, known as shoulder dystocia, occurs when the child’s head can clear but the shoulders require additional medical maneuvers for the child to be delivered. In shoulder dystocia cases, one shoulder of the baby usually is trapped behind the mother’s pelvis, obstructing the baby’s breathing. It is hard to conjure up a more horrific case. This Baltimore jury that heard all the evidence in this medical malpractice case determined the damages at $8.1 million. Why do we have a law in Maryland that only awards these Plaintiffs about one-fourth of what the jury believed was appropriate?

Virginia Lawyers Weekly reports today on a $1,000,000 settlement in a medical malpractice Erb’s palsy case. The interesting thing about this case is that the injuries occurred during a cesarean section. The father of the child claimed he witnessed the obstetrician applying excessive force to the fetal head after the baby’s shoulder did not clear. Plaintiff’s expert testified the doctor failed to make the incision large enough to extract the baby’s head and then inappropriately applied traction to the baby’s still entrapped head. Fortunately, the doctor promptly diagnosed the child with a brachial plexus injury confined to the child’s neck (at C5/C6). After surgery, the child has a good prognosis for a functional arm and hand.

Shoulder dystocia cases are not rare but this is the first case I have seen or read about where the OB/GYN’s malpractice was failing to make a large enough C-section incision.  There are many claims that involve failing to provide a c-section.

These injuries occur with babies that are much larger than typical or, as is frequently the case when the mother has diagnosed or undiagnosed gestational diabetes (or is just a diabetic).   The big thing with this problem is seeing the problem before it manifests itself.

Former Carolina Panthers wide receiver Patrick Jeffers re-filed his medical malpractice and negligence lawsuit last week against the Carolina Panthers’ former team doctor. Jeffers had originally brought a medical malpractice claim in 2003, but his lawyers voluntarily dismissed the claim last year. The new medical malpractice lawsuit is virtually identical to the prior claim. Mr. Jeffers’ medical malpractice attorneys allege that Jeffers’ NFL career was “destroyed” because of the team doctor adding five unauthorized knee procedures to an Aug. 20, 2000 surgery.

The original suit included the Panthers, but a judge ruled that Jeffers’ complaints against the team first needed to go through the NFL’s grievance process because of provisions in the league’s collective bargaining agreement.

I brought a medical malpractice lawsuit against the New England Patriots, their team doctor, and a surgeon who operated on my client about six years ago. The Patriots raised this same defense but did not raise it until we had gone through two years of litigation. The judge ruled that the Patriots had waived their arbitration right by not raising the issue. The Patriots settled the case shortly after this ruling.