Law Blog

Does the gender of your doctor make a difference in health care outcomes? A new study by Harvard researchers, published at the end of last year in JAMA Internal Medicine, proposes that female doctors see better results than male doctors. The study revealed that patients in the care of female doctors were less likely to…

There are few things to make a parent feel more helpless than when your child is deathly ill. You take them to see a doctor and you trust that with the doctor’s decade of training and years of experience helping patients they will know what to do, and do what is best to care for…

Duodenoscopes are small, tube-shaped medical devices used in a procedure called an endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) to diagnose health problems in the digestive tract. Due to a problem with cleaning these scopes, they can become infected with bacteria after being used on one patient which can then be transferred to the next patient. The U.S.…

Doctors and other medical professionals are highly trained and go through years of study and practice in order to be able to treat patients. You know that doctors are not infallible, but you trust in their expertise in being able to diagnose what is wrong and offer appropriate treatment when you are ill. If you…

E. coli is a dangerous infection that can lead to more serious illnesses and even death. There are ways to diagnose it and treat it, but time is a key factor. In a recent heartbreaking story out of Georgia, a toddler named Grayson Dunham died within a week after showing symptoms of a deadly E.…

Just because your doctor or any other medical professional made a mistake about your care, it does not amount to medical malpractice. As a plaintiff (the person who brings the claim) you need to establish a few things before you can even file a medical malpractice lawsuit. If you are unsure whether or not you…

Telemedicine is being lauded as the next step in the evolution of health care delivery. Whether the patient accesses their doctor through an online forum accessible from their home computer screen, or through a kiosk in a clinic or workplace, the patient is talking to the health care provider through a live, video conference arrangement.…

What did boxer Muhammad Ali, Muppets creator Jim Henson, and actress Patty Duke all have in common? Each of these legends died from sepsis, a condition which kills about 258,000 Americans each year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines sepsis as a complication caused by the body’s overwhelming and life-threatening response to an…

You may have visited a chiropractor to treat back or neck pain after an auto accident, or for the treatment of an old injury that has come back to cause you pain. You may walk away feeling relieved, and you may think that chiropractic care is harmless. However, some chiropractors do not honor their duty…

When you hear about a miracle of modern medicine – like when a little boy is given a hand transplant, or when a medical advancement allows someone to live when in years past he or she would have died – it can make you feel encouraged that we live in such an exciting time. Just…

Medical malpractice lawsuits receive a tremendous amount of news coverage when there are large verdicts involved. When there is a lot of publicity about a verdict in the millions of dollars, the general public might begin to get a distorted idea about the truth when it comes to real world medical malpractice lawsuits. Clearly there…

If you think that cosmetic surgery and plastic surgery were just two different names for the same specialty, you would be incorrect, but you would have plenty of company. It is a common misconception that cosmetic and plastic surgery are the same. The American Board of Cosmetic Surgery describes cosmetic surgery as focused on enhancing…

While many people have an image of nurses as doting caregivers who are at our bedside attending to our needs when we are ill or in pain, nurses, just like doctors or any other professional can make mistakes, too. When a nurse’s mistake can be shown to have been negligent, causing injury to the patient,…

A St. Louis jury awarded $17.6 million in damages to a couple who had filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against a doctor for overprescribing opioid pain medication. The plaintiff, Brian Koon, was awarded $1.4 million and Michelle Koon, his estranged wife, was awarded $1.2 million. The remaining $15 million was awarded as punitive damages against…

By their nature, emergency rooms are chaotic places. Medical staff receive patients from all walks of life with a range of injuries from cuts and lacerations to heart attack or stroke. Even in an environment of chaos and confusion, doctors call upon their years of study and training, and their skill acquired over their years…

On May 18, 2016, a jury in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, awarded $5 million to the family of a man who died at Abington Memorial Hospital in 2008 from having had a feeding tube misplaced in his lung. Marvin Summerford, who was 88-years-old, died a horrifying death in 2008 as his left lung slowly filled with…

When a doctor makes a big mistake during surgery, do you think that they should apologize for the error? One doctor at Yale New Haven Hospital allegedly made a big surgical error, but not only did they not apologize, they lied and tried to cover up the mistake. Deborah Crave, a 60-year-old patient had surgery…