Ohio Personal Injury Law Blog

Closing arguments in just one of many medical malpractice cases against disgraced ear, nose and throat specialist Dr. Mark Weinberger occurred Friday after a jury found the doctor guilty of medical malpractice and handed down a nearly $300,000 verdict for former Weinberger patient, William Boyer, of Gary, Ind.

This is significantly more than the defense believed Boyer deserved in compensation for his "inconvenience and discomfort" caused by the doctor. The defense initially thought $25,000 was more than generous. Boyer's attorneys did not see the situation in the same light. The plaintiff sought more than $1 million in the case. The jury came to the judgment amount based on 12 times the defenses calculation for ongoing surgery and physical and emotional suffering.

This blog post is a continuation from our post earlier in the week based on a New York Times article regarding hospital use of look-alike tubes in medical procedures, which are killing patients.

International medical standards groups have been seeking consensus on specific designs on how tubes for different bodily functions should differ, however, the group has been trying to coordinate this for years and complete recommendations are estimated to take even more time. Some manufacturers have used colors to distinguish different tube functions, but with every company using it's own coloring method its just adding to the confusion. Ultimately, continuing to place hospitals at risk for medical malpractice and negligence suits.

A number of medical negligence and medical malpractice cases over the last couple of years have been centered on medical mistakes by medical professionals due to the use of wrong tubes in medical procedures. One recent case, published in the New York Times, highlights the real danger of this problem in hospitals.

A 35-week pregnant woman began feeling ill with consistent vomiting and weight loss, as a result her doctor hospitalized her and ordered that she be fed through a tube until the baby was born. While tending to the woman, hospital staff mixed up the tubes and instead of snaking a tube through the woman's nose into her stomach, the nurse connected the liquid-food bag to a tube that entered the woman's vein.

A medical malpractice suit reached a settlement after county officials agreed to pay $5.5 million to the family of a Redondo Beach girl who suffered traumatic, permanent brain damage after a cheerleading accident three years ago in California. The settlement marks one of the largest settlements for any medical malpractice suit in the country. The high cost of the settlement is due to the girl's ongoing medical care for the rest of her life.

The girl was injured after toppling to the ground after a pyramid-style cheerleading stunt on Aug. 30, 2007. The girl was taken to County Harbor-UCLA Media Center near Torrance following the accident. While under their care, she was diagnosed with a small subdural hematoma, or bleeding of the brain, and was released after five days of observation.

Last Thursday, a family filed a medical malpractice suit against St. Joseph's Hospital in St. Paul, Minn., claiming that their father died from injuries sustained after he fell off an operating table during surgery. According to news reports, the family of 61-year-old Max DeVries expected his scheduled surgery to be a routine procedure but ended in his death on March 8, 2010.

The suit claims that during surgery DeVries somehow rolled off or fell off the operating table just before his surgery was to be performed. Reports detail that he was under anesthesia when he fell to the ground. He was in surgery to undergo a procedure to drain fluid in his back caused by dwelling in his brain.

An Ohio-based medical malpractice lawsuit recently ended in a $2 million judgment against a doctor who performed tonsillectomies on twin boys at Memorial Hospital of Union County in Ohio. This judgment comes after a two-week trial that proved to be an emotional ordeal for all those involved.

During the two-week trial, the court heard testimony from doctors and the family of A.J. and Joshua Legge, twin boys who died shortly after seeing a Marysville otolaryngologist for a routine tonsillectomies procedure. According to doctors, the procedure went as planned and the boys were sent home the same day. Just a day after the procedure one of the boys stopped breathing and was rushed to the hospital. As the child's parents were at the hospital, the other boy began to suffocate in the same manner. Both boys died on the same day.

According to a new survey conducted by the American Medical Association (AMA), more than 60 percent of doctors, age 55 or higher, have been sued at least once for medical malpractice. Taking into account that some of these cases will vary in result, the survey still shows that most physicians will be sued for medical malpractice at least once in their careers. "This works out to an average of 95 medical malpractice lawsuits having been filed for every 100 physicians now in practice.

Despite the high number of doctors that are sued sometime in their careers, the survey found that only 5 percent of doctors are sued on an annual basis. In addition, certain specialized practices, such as general surgeons and Ob/Gyns, were more than five times more likely to be sued than pediatricians and psychiatrists. According to the data, about half (50 percent) of obstetricians/gynecologists under the age of 40 had faced a suit. This number jumped to 90 percent for those surgeons age 55 or over.

If you pick up a newspaper or read an online magazine on any given day, one can always find stories about medication errors or medical malpractice stories involving the mis-prescription of pharmaceutical drugs. The pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars each year to marketing their drugs to patients and doctors alike, but how far reaching is pharma's influence on drug trials and research?

According to recent analysis of drug trials published Monday, drug studies and trials that were funded by drug companies were much more likely to produce positive results and show that the drug worked than independent or university funded studies.

Analysis of nearly 546 drug trials found that pharmaceutical funded trials reported positive outcomes 85 percent of the time compared with 50 percent for government-funded trials and nonprofit or non-federal organizations which received positive results 72 percent of the time.