Medical Malpractice

The patient safety advocacy organization The Leapfrog Group published a report in 2014 that identified hospital errors as the third leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease and cancer. This report estimates that up to 440,000 Americans die each year from preventable hospital errors. A new idea that could help make…

Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI) or health care associated infections affect patients in hospital or other health-care facilities and were not present or incubating at the time of admission. HAIs represent the most frequent, adverse events in health-care delivery worldwide. Approximately 30 percent of patients in ICUs will be affected by at least one health-care associated…

In 2008, a Florida woman named Jacqueline Granicz, who was suffering from depression, called her doctor’s office and reported that she felt like she was under a great deal of mental strain;, she was crying easily and experiencing stomach pain and other problems. When Dr. Chirillo learned about Ms. Granicz’s call from his assistant, he…

There are few topics more distasteful than fecal transplants, and discussing them with a doctor can be embarrassing for many people. However, a fecal transplant could be the cure to Clostridium difficile, or C. diff, a nasty infection that affects up to half a million people each year and kills close to 30,000, according to…

What if you received a serious injury in an auto accident and your doctor prescribed pain medication to which you quickly became addicted? Can you sue your doctor for medical malpractice? In West Virginia you can. In May 2015, the West Virginia Supreme Court, in a 3-2 decision, rules that those who are addicted to…

Preventable medical errors are absolutely rampant in this country, and what goes on in operating rooms is not always carefully documented. A study conducted by Patient Safety America estimates that more than 400,000 people die each year of preventable medical errors in hospitals and other medical settings. There are several cases of preventable medical errors…

The Food and Drug Administration has issued a safety advisory to doctors, pharmacists and patients to check both the prescription and the label on medicine bottles before taking a new prescription drug. They have received several reports concerning prescription errors with regard to drugs with similar sounding names, but with completely different purposes. For example,…

The rise in popularity of gastric bypass and other surgical weight loss procedures is directly linked to the rising obesity rates in the Unites States. Gastric bypass is a bariatric surgery technique which treats morbid obesity by dividing the stomach into a small pouch and re-routing the small intestine. This procedure reduces the volume of…

A team of researchers from MIT, Rush University Medical Center, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have published a paper on Adverse Events in Robotic Surgery, which takes a look at the causes and patient impacts of surgical adverse events in an effort to improve operational systems and practices in the future. After reviewing more…

Preventable medical errors are frightfully frequent in modern medicine. Research in the Journal of Patient Safety estimates that upwards of 440,000 people die each year and thousands more are injured in the United States from medical errors. This makes medical/hospital mistakes the third leading cause of death for Americans. Doctors (as we and they may…

In what is being called the most serious case of medical fraud in U.S. history, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Borman sentenced oncologist Farid Fata to 45 years in prison and ordered him to pay more than $17.6 million in restitution for scamming hundreds of patients. His upscale clinics were located in the Detroit area…

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are an estimated 30,100 central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSA) in U.S. health care facilities each year. These are serious infections that cause the prolongation of hospital stays and increased risk of death. These infections are preventable through the use of proper insertion techniques and the…

Emergency rooms are there to help people in the midst of a crisis. The medical personnel who staff emergency departments are generally well skilled individuals who save lives on a daily basis. However, mistakes can happen in the emergency room. People come in with life-threatening injuries, or they present with strange symptoms and the doctors…

There has been such a significant surge in plastic surgery procedures being conducted by unqualified doctors that the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) is issuing a warning about the dangers and the failed procedures being done by unqualified physicians. Once they have had unfavorable results from using an unqualified physician, many patients seek out…

Malpractice events rarely involve “just one” error; in truth, one mistake often leads to a cascade of errors. Sometimes the errors are seemingly minor. Other times, the doctor and the team makes an error so egregious that it is almost inconceivable that it happened. These types of errors are referred to by the medical community…