Injury: Injured ureter during obstetric surgery resulting in multiple surgeries to repair, chronic urinary difficulty and urinary tract infection and pain and discomfort Age of Patient at Injury: 37 years old Result: $350,000 Settlement Court: Lancaster County, PA Comment: Our client was a young mother who had a c-section with her second child. During the [...]
Sources: Choosing Wisely.org (An Initiative of the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation) Press Release; NY Times Health Blog Under the "educational initiative" of Choosing Wisely, led by the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation and involving 8 other specialty boards are recommending less routine testing for their patients. The thought process is that unnecessary [...]
Sources: The US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), the Dartmouth Health Atlas, the U.S. Census Bureau The 2012 County Health Rankings report, the third annual, is out today and measures each of the 3,005 counties in the U.S. The report, which draws on data from the CDC, the Dartmouth Health Atlas, the U.S. [...]
Sources: The Lancet online, BBC Health They aren't entirely new, however, in one of the first radomised and controlled studies, women with a short cervix (identified by transvaginal ultrasound at 20-23 weeks) had a simple silicon pessary device inserted to determine if this might reduce the risk of preterm labor. A Brief Background Being born [...]
Source: US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) The FDA has issued an update warning doctors and patients of the dangers of transvaginal mesh placement. This follows years of dramatic increases in reports of adverse events over the use of surgical mesh for the transvaginal repair of POP (pelvic organ prolapse). POP occurs when the internal [...]
Sources: Harvard School of Public Health, Annals of Internal Medicine online, BBC Health News Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) research suggests that routine mammography screening, the current essential tool in detecting early breast cancers, may lead to a significant amount of overdiagnosis of disease that would otherwise have proved harmless. The researchers analyzed data from [...]
Sources: The Lancet; US Preventivie Serivices Task Force; WebMD It appears that way. It is largely accepted that 90% of all cervical cancers are caused by the Human Papillomavirus (HPV). Accordingly, a team of Dutch researchers set out to determine whether detecting the cause of the majority of cervical cancers could out-predict the traditional test. 45,000 [...]
Source: Chicago's Northwestern University News Center; www.northwestern.edu In what has been termed the "first study in which women are actually asked questions," a staggering 36% of postmenopausal women who are treated for estrogen-sensitive breast cancer quit using drugs that help prevent the disease from recurring. Universally the reason is because of side effects of the medication, [...]
Source: US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) The US FDA has revoked it's prior approval of Avastin for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer. Avastin came onto the market as being a meidication with great promise for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer. FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg stated plainly in her Decision of the Commissioner, that, "[T]there is [...]
Source: American Society of Nephrology; the Preeclampsia Foundation Pre-eclampsia is a heart condition that occurs only during and after pregnancy which can affects both the mother and baby. It occurs in at least 5-8% of all pregnancies. Pre-eclampsia is a rapidly progressive condition commonly starting with high blood pressure and the presence of protein in the urine. [...]