Medical Malpractice | InjuryBoard Boston

The recent case of a young person dying during a wisdom-tooth removal has raised questions over the safe use of anesthesia in office-based surgical procedures. Anesthesia complications or deaths are not limited to office surgery, (such as oral surgery, plastic surgery, etc.), yet in hospital or ambulatory situations there are perhaps more precautions taken, better monitoring and certainly more...

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Since 2000 the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has renewed efforts to prevent medication errors and other patient-related safety problems. The HHS formed the Patient Safety Task Force, which is a conglomeration of other agencies united to improve health-care safety, including the FDA and CDC. In 2002, the FDA devoted an entire division to assessing and correcting medication...

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A British study reported last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reported a significantly higher risk of hip fractures in patients over 50 years of age, taking popular heartburn drugs, such as Nexium, Prevacid, or Prilosec, for more than a year. The drugs, as any television watcher or magazine reader, knows, have been heavily advertised. The drugs that showed the highest...

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Earlier this year, GlaxoSmithKline, agreed to add a new warning to its anti-depressant drug, Paxil, and its controlled release version, Paxil Cr. The generic name for Paxil is paroxetine. The warnings will focus on young adults ages 18 - 30, and reads:"In some children and teens, antidepressants increase suicidal thoughts or actions. Young adults, especially those with depression, may be at...

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Biogen Idec, Inc., the manufacturer of the drug, Rituxan, just issued to an alert to doctors, warning that two patients taking Rituxan died of the fatal brain disease, "progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy" (PML). Both patients who died were being treated experimentally with the drug, for lupus. While Rituxan is approved by the Food and Drug Administration, only for treatment of rheumatoid...

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The pharmaceutical industry and medical profession have known for years that the misinterpretation of medical abbreviations can cause injury or death. Fixing the problem is much more difficult than identifying it. Medications are manufactured by any of numerous pharmaceutical companies, and are dispensed by tens or hundreds of thousands of health care professionals. Names of completely different...

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Earlier this year, the federal Food and Drug Administration passed new rules designed to make it easier for doctors to get essential information from the inserts inside packages of prescription drugs. The rules change reflected an understanding that the growing complexity of information presented in package inserts, was becoming confusing even to physicians. Serious medication errors were a...

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The ground breaking book, Medication Errors, edited by Michael R. Cohen, was published in 1999. In November of this year, Medication Errors 2nd Edition, was released. A review the book reveals the nature of some of the still-problematic areas of medication errors, as well as the ongoing efforts of the medical profession to reduce them.Pediatric medication errors continue to be a serious problem....

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Pharmacy errors cause over 7,000 deaths per year, and around 5% of the more than 3 billion prescriptions filled are incorrect, according to the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP). The NABP has even created a special task force to combat medication errors in pharmacies as the number of prescriptions increases and the potential for error rises as well. Pharmacy medication errors...

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Following demographics, many pharmaceutical companies are making so-called "EZ Open" pill bottles designed for adults with arthritis in their hands. The problem is that some of the bottles can also be readily opened by children. The danger of a medication overdose to a child is made greater because many pills are colorful and sugar-coated, making them attractive to a child. Recently, a...

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Massachusetts, like most states, treats medical malpractice different than most personal injury cases. The Legislature bought into the insurance industry's false, but brilliantly executed, argument that medical malpractice litigation was responsible for driving doctors' insurance rates sky high and for driving doctors out of the state. It is easy to be suspicious of the motives behind the...

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The prevalence of drug-resistant, hospital-acquired infections should still be a cause for concern among doctors and patients, according to a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC's press release on the study's findings discloses that over the past 30 years, "staph" infections, acquired in hospitals and other healthcare facilities such as nursing homes,...

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Two incidents involving anesthesia within the last two months, illustrate that anesthesia mistakes can be deadly when they occur, despite the medical profession's efforts to prevent them. At the end of September, a 5 year old girl died at the dentist's office, where she had gone for routine filling and capping of teeth. The child never awoke. Although the facts are not definitively known as yet,...

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A trip to the local drug store to fill a prescription seems as benign as a trip to the supermarket to buy a quart of milk. As a matter of fact, many supermarkets now have pharmacies. In addition to the huge number and varied types of pharmacies, add the proliferation of new drugs and the aging of the general population, and you get billions of prescriptions filled each year. The United States is...

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Since the 1990s, emergency room closings and emergency room errors have been on the rise, due to rising healthcare costs, shrinking hospital budgets and dwindling staff levels. During the same time period, the number of patients seeking ER care as risen.The American College of Emergency Physicians has posted an action-alert page urging people to write to their Congressional representatives to...

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