Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

Article posted on: 07/09/2008

Recently, the family of a 39 year old Michigan construction worker who worked as a ditch digger and pipe layer received a 9 million dollar jury award in a medical malpractice/negligence lawsuit following the man’s death from a fungal infection. The man, who took medicine for rheumatoid arthritis (which resulted in a compromised immune system) began suffering from a fever of unknown origin. After 10 days, he was admitted to a hospital under the care of two internal medicine doctors and an infectious disease specialist. For nine days, he underwent tests, including a general fungal test. He subsequently became critically ill and died. The cause of death was ultimately determined to be disseminated histoplasmosis, a fungal infection contracted from the soil. Because of the man’s daily contact with the soil, the family argued that the defendant doctors should have performed a biopsy or urine test to timely rule out histoplasmosis while he was hospitalized. At the conclusion of the trial, the jury found the health care providers negligent awarded the family $9 million dollars.

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

Article posted on: 06/23/2008

As initially reported in the Cincinnati Enquirer, an Ohio woman whose baby was stuck in her birth canal for 13½ hours won $22.6 million last month in a medical malpractice lawsuit. A Hamilton County jury – which heard five weeks of testimony and deliberated for 3½ days – found physician and her practice group negligent in the case. Jurors also found that the doctor and her group knew or should have known their actions would have resulted in brain injuries during the Sept. 4, 1997, birth of the woman’s child. According to the Plaintiff’s attorney, the evidence was very compelling that this baby was not going to fit through the birth canal due to her size of over nine pounds. In addition, the mother was known to have a narrow pelvic arch. In addition to being a big baby in a small canal, the baby’s injuries also were allegedly caused because medical workers continued to give the mother drugs to make the uterus contract, hoping to expel the baby. The result was a uterus contracting on the baby’s stuck head, causing brain damage. Ultimately, the baby was delivered by Caesarian section. Now 11, the baby is a spastic quadriplegic. The baby suffered brain damage that will affect her for life because her head was squeezed for so long. She can walk short distances but needs a walker. She can see but because the part of her brain that processes vision was damaged, her brain can’t properly interpret what her eyes see. She has problems using her hands, and she is mildly retarded. She also suffers from signs and symptoms consistent with cerebral palsy.

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

Article posted on: 06/23/2008

At Silverman Thompson, we are well known in the Baltimore-Washington area for successfully handling many medical malpractice (medical negligence) cases. Our lawyers routinely return verdicts for our clients that are among the highest in the state of Maryland. These verdicts regularly exceed a million dollars and more often than not are in the multi-million dollar range. Our lawyers handle these cases typically on a contingent fee basis, meaning we lay out the expenses in advance and our clients are only responsible for repaying those expenses and the attorneys’ fees if we are successful for them by way of settlement, trial or on appeal.

While the care is generally good at area hospitals, and in this region of the country in general, patients and their loved ones need to watch out for themselves or loved ones when they are treated at or admitted to these hospitals. Unfortunately, our office has handled medical malpractice / negligence cases against almost every hospital in the Baltimore-Washington area, including Johns Hopkins Hospital, Johns Hopkins Bayview, University of Maryland Medical Center, Maryland General Hospital, Harbor Hospital, Mercy Medical Center, Sinai Hospital, Northwest Hospital, Greater Baltimore Medical Center (GBMC), Franklin Square Hospital, Howard County General Hospital, Anne Arundel Medial Center, Baltimore Washington Medical Center, Upper Chesapeake Medical Center, Harford Memorial Hospital, Frederick Memorial Hospital, Washington Adventist Hospital, and Shady Grove Adventist Hospital. Again, while the care at these hospitals is generally good, there continue to be instances of substantial medical negligence that result in patients being severely and permanently injured. In rarer cases, the medical negligence tragically leads to the death of a patient. As a result, our office recommends that each time you or a loved one is treated at a hospital, you establish a relationship with the doctors and nurses who will be caring for you or the loved one, ask as many questions as you feel are necessary and be present as much as possible to oversee what is going on. It is only through an open dialogue with these health care providers that you will receive the necessary information to make informed decisions about your or your loved ones’ health.

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

Article posted on: 06/03/2008

As first reported in the Tuscon Citizen last month, a jury awarded a Tucson family $6 million in a lawsuit brought after an ailing 81-year-old relative died of a morphine overdose. According to the article, Mary Culpepper and two other relatives last month were awarded $2 million each, with the cost to be paid 90 percent by operators of a nursing home, Manor Care Health Services, and 10 percent to be paid by Tucson Medical Center. Culpepper sued Manor Care, TMC, a doctor, nurse and pharmacy over the Dec. 8, 2003, death of her mother, Sylvia Culpepper. She was admitted to TMC on Dec. 2, 2003, suffering from sciatica, a painful nerve condition. On Dec. 4, 2003, she was prescribed 15 milligrams of morphine twice a day. Two days later, her dosage increased to 30 milligrams, twice a day. When Culpepper was transferred from TMC to Manor Care, prescription orders contained both dosages. According to the lawsuit, the Manor Care staff failed to note the discrepancy in the prescriptions and gave her both dosages, both twice a day. An autopsy determined that Culpepper died of acute morphine intoxication.

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

As first reported in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last month, a Superior Court judge struck down the cap on damage awards in medical malpractice cases as unconsitutional. If upheld on appeal, this holding could undercut a major component of Georgia’s tort reform laws. Superior Court Judge Marvin Arrington wrote in an order that the legislative cap of $350,000 for noneconomic damages such as pain and suffering was unconstitutional because it gave special protections to the medical profession. This meant people injured by doctors had less protection than those injured by, say, a manufacturer’s product. The legislature approved the $350,000 cap in 2005 as part of a civil-justice tort reform law over the opposition of the Georgia Trial Lawyers Association and consumer groups. Doctors and hospitals said the law was needed to hold down malpractice-insurance premiums. In reaction to Arrington’s ruling, the Medical Association of Georgia said tort reform had made doctors’ services, such as obstetrical and general surgery, more accessible because of reduced insurance premiums. In 2006, the Georgia Supreme Court stuck down another provision of tort reform when it ruled that defendants couldn’t decide in which county their medical-malpractice case was tried. When the malpractice cap was enacted, trial lawyers complained its real effect was to reduce the incentive for doctors, hospitals and insurers to negotiate substantial settlements because they wouldn’t face the threat of large verdicts for pain and suffering and other noneconomic damages, which are the most subjective part of jury awards. As set forth in the opinion, Arrington opined that “the statute effectively puts substantial limitations on the rights of the poor and middle class to recovery while leaving the right to virtually unlimited recoveries unimpeded for the wealthy.”

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

As reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer last month, an ongoing case in federal court in Newark, New Jersey highlights the hidden dangers of organ transplants in the United States, a little known and/or reported danger, but one that is reported in the medical literature. In 2005, Tony Grier, 43, was dying from a rare lung disease when he received two donor lungs from a 31 year old woman who died in a car accident. Grier died six months later after it was discovered that the transplanted lungs had lung cancer. Lawyers for Mr. Grier’s estate contend the hospital should have known the lungs were cancerous because the donor had smoked for 16 years. Defendants in the suit are the University of Pennsylvania Health System, the hospital and surgeons who performed the transplant and evaluated the lungs, and Lancaster General Hospital, where they were harvested. The suit alleges that the defendants failed to perform necessary tests that would have detected cancer, and also failed to find it after the transplant. According to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), a national nonprofit that was established by Congress in 1984 to administer the nation’s transplantation network, lung cancer in a transplanted organ is very rare. Data from the UNOS shows that cancer, of any kind, was transmitted to 47 organ recipients between 1994 and 2006. Lung transplant recipients accounted for eight of those cases. In short, despite all of the efforts being made by health care providers to secure a safe organ for transplantation, transmission of malignancy in a donor organ and/or other diseases, can happen. As a result, donor registries continue to seek to improve their abilities to obtain accurate medical information from donor patients while the organ donee facilities simultaneously seek more accessibility to personal data and information regarding the donating parties so as to avoid this possibility.

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

As was reported by the Associated Press, the birth of Susan Anne Catherine Torres, delivered by a brain-dead mother who was kept on life support to sustain the pregnancy, made medical history less than three years ago. A recently filed malpractice lawsuit is now raising legal questions about the degree to which a doctor’s obligations in treating a pregnant woman also extend to her unborn fetus. In the lawsuit, Jason Torres, the father of the Susan Anne and husband of the brain-dead mother, Susan Torres, seeks damages against the ER physician who treated his wife in 2005. The lawsuit holds the ER physician responsible not only for the mother’s death, but also the death of the baby, who died 5 weeks after delivery due to complications from a premature delivery.

In the lawsuit, Mr. Torres alleges that the ER doctor dismissed as “morning sickness” symptoms that indicated a more serious problem. Those symptoms included memory lapses–witnessed by a nurse–in which Susan Michelle Torres couldn’t recognize her husband when she was sitting next to him. The Complaint alleges that further tests would have revealed bleeding on the brain. After being discharged from the hospital, Ms. Torres fell into a coma from a brain hemorrhage caused by melanoma. At the time, she was about 14 weeks pregnant. Mr. Torres made the decision to keep his wife on life support, with the hope that the baby could develop to the point of viability. Doctors were able to keep the mother on life support for 3 months, long enough for the fetus to become viable. Delivery occurred 13 weeks prematurely. The next day the mother was taken off life support and died.

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

As was first reported in the Las Vegas Sun, a lawsuit was settled last month which claimed that a doctor missed a man’s cancer during a hastily performed colonoscopy. Kevin Rexford, a 46-year-old pharmacist, said the defendant, one of the clinic’s owners, missed an obvious colon cancer diagnosis three years ago. The alleged failure allowed the cancer to spread throughout his body and he now has only about a 10 percent chance of living five more years. Rexford is married with two young children, a fact that makes the failed diagnosis all the more difficult to reconcile. A source familiar with the case said the settlement was in the range of $2 million, the maximum amount of insurance carried by the doctor and his affiliated medical practice. Experts who were paid to review the case on Rexford’s behalf said the defendant only took only three minutes – half the minimum recommended time – to examine Rexford’s colon for cancer during a Jan. 28, 2005, procedure. His missed diagnosis allowed the cancer to progress to an incurable stage, the experts said.

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

Sepsis – the body’s ultimate response to a bacterial infection — is characterized by severe reaction of the body’s organs to the foreign bacteria and/or death. Sepsis is also referred to as systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS). Although sepsis often results from the widespread invasion of bacteria into a patient’s bloodstream, this invasion is not essential for the development of severe sepsis since local infection/inflammation can also cause distant organ dysfunction and blood pressure irregularities. Some of the common places in the body where an infection might start include the skin (celluitis), the lungs (bacterial pneumonia), liver, gall bladder, lining of the brain (meningitis), the bloodstream, the bones, the bowel, or the kidneys. For hospitalized patients, common sources of infections include bedsores (decubitus ulcers), surgical drains, intravenous lines, or surgical wounds. Unfortunately, bacteria live and breed in hospitalized settings, and thus, many healthy people who have suffered an injury requiring a drain, or IV lines or open ports into their blood stream often contract an infection that turns into sepsis.

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 Posted on January 01, 2017 in Medical Malpractice

Article posted on: 04/23/2008

Maryland personal injury lawyers are preparing for a potential class action law suit against a Maryland firm which owns the majority of Wisconsin based Scientific Protein Laboratories, Ltd., a Wisconsin-based company.

According to The Daily Record, the FDA sent Scientific Protein Laboratories a warning letter that its plant in China is believed to be producing the contaminated heparin. American Capital Strategies, located in Bethesda Maryland, owns 90% of the Wisconsin-based company. A Maryland class action law suit may be ripe against the Maryland based company based on deaths and injuries associated with the contaminated heparin. Maryland personal injury lawyers Silverman Thompson have served as local counsel for a major class action in the past and are currently accepting new clients who have been injured by the tainted heparin.

Heparin is used in dialysis and is also used to prevent clotting in catheters, which 25 percent of dialysis patients have to use for treatment. The drug is also commonly used in heart bypass surgery. As an anticoagulant, Heparin can be used to reduced the risk of blood clots before surgery.

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