All Topics

• Incidence of Nursing Home Abuse

  Ken Margolin | May 30, 2007 7:00 AM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  Identifying just how much abuse occurs in nursing homes, is difficult. Victims are often unwilling or unable to speak up. Perpetrators may be nursing home staff, who have ongoing contact with the victim, and whose presence alone, may be intimidating. Nursing home assaults can be committed by a resident, when staff supervision is inadequate, lackadaisacal, or uncaring. It is almost certain,...

• Dropped Clues Lead to Medical Malpractice and Patient Death

  Ken Margolin | May 23, 2007 7:00 AM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  A doctor can no more afford to ignore clues provided by his patient, than a homicide detective can fail to dust the crime scene for fingerprints. The best internists would undoubtedly make great detectives. When the body provides clues that something is not working properly, the doctor must follow the clues until he diagnoses the cause of the troubling symptom. In fairness to physicians, the...

• Caesaren Section Issues

  Ken Margolin | May 21, 2007 7:00 AM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  Caesaren sections, commonly termed "C-sections," have been around for centuries. There are reports of C-sections being performed as early as the 13th century. Early C-sections were performed to remove babies from the wombs of mothers who had died during childbirth. Modern Caesaren sections, of course, are a great life-saver for mothers as well as babies. As with all advances in medicine,...

• Fire Danger in General Electric Dishwashers

  Ken Margolin | May 16, 2007 5:50 PM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), with the cooperation of General Electric, has issued a recall for washing machines manufactured by the company. The washing machines are sold under various brand names, including, G.E., Eterna, GE Profile, GE Monogram, Hotpoint, and Sears-Kenmore. The CPSC has received a dozen reports of fires causing property damage, emanating from...

• Expert Testimony in Personal Injury Cases

  Ken Margolin | May 16, 2007 7:00 AM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  Most every serious personal injury case, will have at least one expert witness testifying for the plaintiff - if only a physician, explaining the extent of the plaintiff's injuries. Medical malpractice plaintiffs must have an expert to testify to the defendant's deviation from acceptable standards of medical care. Expert testimony gets really interesting, when the cause of an event is in...

• Truck Accidents Unbound

  Ken Margolin | May 14, 2007 7:00 AM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  Last week, it was a large truck that overturned on Route 128, near Lexington, creating a massive traffic jam for hours. On almost any given day on an elevated ramp near Chelsea, a truck may catapult the guard rail and fall to the road below. Large trucks so frequently cause gridlock, crashes, injuries, and death, on Massachusetts roadways, that reports of the damage they cause, seem...

• Communication Breakdown Results in Death - Medical Malpractice Settlement

  Ken Margolin | May 09, 2007 9:00 AM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  Failures to communicate continue to bedevil the medical profession. Patient deaths and injuries due to communication breakdowns are especially tragic, because the preventative measure, was often as simple as picking up a telephone or sending a note. In an era of multi-million dollar technology and advanced bioscience, person-to-person communication remains a cornerstone of good medical care....

• Disastrous Distractions

  Ken Margolin | May 07, 2007 7:00 AM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  Driving while chowing down a donut, alternating the snack with a cup of hot coffee, is a time-honored example of dangerous, distracted driving. Even though driving safety researchers preached that drinking a beverage while driving, could lead to car crashes due to distraction, human nature dictated that eating and drinking while driving, was never going to stop. The ante was raised with the...

• Shame

  Ken Margolin | May 03, 2007 4:30 PM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  The much publicized lawsuit by a sitting D.C. administrative judge, seeking $67 million for a lost pair of pants, is a cruel perversion of the justice system. The plaintiff has done immeasurable damage to the hard-working defendants, immigrants from South Korea, to legitimate plaintiffs, the justice system, and, one would think, to his self-respect. The anti-justice forces, aka "tort reformers,"...

• Epidemic of Nursing Home Abuse Continues

  Ken Margolin | April 27, 2007 9:30 AM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  Newspapers are printing an advance overview of a GAO (Government Accountability Office) report, due out next week. The GAO investigated nursing homes receiving Medicaid/Medicare payments, to see if incidences of nursing home abuse had lessened since a 1998 GAO report, targeting such disgraces. The new report is not encouraging. Even homes in which instances of shocking abuse occur, receive...