Injury: Permanent colostomy and cognitive impairment Age of Patient at Injury: 11 months Result: $800,000 Settlement Court: Atlantic County, NJ Comments: Our client and his family brought suit for the failure of the hospital where he was delivered and the doctors attending to him to timely recognize and surgically treat a congenital bowel movement problem. [...]
Source: Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare In a shocking report which demonstrates that calls for "Tort Reform" are premature, surgeries performed by doctors on the wrong part of the body, occur 40 times per week in hospitals across the United States. The Joint Commission is the credentialing body which surveys US hospitals for, among [...]
Source: New York Times National Ed., 3/6/2011; US Food & Drug Administration We previously reported on radiation errors with CT brain perfusion scans when they were widely reported in the summer of 2009 at Cedars-Sinai. Following reports at several other hospitals, the Food and Drug Administration conducted an investigation into why patients tested with this [...]
Source: NYT Sunday Opinion, 2/27/2011, Abraham Verghese Stanford University School of Medicine's Professor and author, Abraham Verghese has made timely observations as our society becomes ever more dependent upon technology and artificial intelligence, particularly as it relates to modern medicine. "When I was an intern some 30 years ago, about three million CT scans were [...]
Source: BBC Health News In apparent response to our prior post on the potential over-prescription of statins for cholesterol management in borderline or healthy patients, the BBC and the pharmaceutical industry has struck back. (That was sarcasm for those who may have missed it. Like I have that kind of influence). A new article has [...]
Source: BBC Health News According to a comprehensive review of previous studies on statins (cholesterol lowering drugs), healthy people may derive no benefit from taking statins. The report, published in The Cochrane Library, did ultimately conclude that statins reduced death rates. However, it found no evidence to justify their use in people at low risk of [...]
Source: BBC Health; The Lancet All it takes is one editorial...or something like that. The respected Brit Medical journal The Lancet has published an editorial tied to a current study by physicians in the U.S. and in Greece on obesity and antibiotic dosage. The argument? With rising waistline sizes, the doses of antibiotics currently administered [...]
Source: The Wall Street Journal Along with the groundswell of lukewarm support for Health Care Reform in the United States comes the screeching noise from the physician's lobby arm over Tort Reform. And on cue, the Central Budgeting Office goes to work making numbers work. Guess what? They found out that money could be saved [...]
Source: BBC Health; British Heart Foundation I'm not being ageist, but how else do I refer to patients aged 80 and over, other than elderly? I'll take your suggestions. Cardiac (that's in relation to the heart) guidelines in both the US and the UK are similar in their recommendations for blood pressure medications at age [...]
Source: Wall Street Journal Market Watch Wow! Who saw this one coming?<Raises hand emphatically> The SEC (That's Securities and Exchange Commission) which regulates trade is "investigating" deals made by and among Big Pharma, Inc., including Pfizer's takeover of Wyeth and Merck's acquisition deal with Shering-Plough. Then, there's Abbott's pick up of Advanced Medical Optics and [...]