As congressional Republicans pursue their counter factual campaign this week to strip patients of their rights to pursue legal redress for harms they suffer while seeking medical services, the Florida Supreme Court has sent a powerful message to federal lawmakers about the wrongheadedness of some of their key notions. The justices in Tallahassee have repudiated….
Continue ReadingAnesthesia
New cautions issued on babies and anesthesia, newborn screenings
Some new cautions have been issued on some key aspects of children’s health care. The federal government is increasing its warnings on anesthetic use for children and expectant moms, while a newspaper investigation is raising issues with common newborn screenings and their inconsistency and inaccuracy. Meantime, a health news site is adding to questions about….
Continue ReadingRationed care? MDs, hospitals say drug shortages are causing it
When partisans want to terrify Americans about their access to health care, they use a code term: rationed care. It turns out that doctors and hospitals nationwide already have made that frightening prospect real: They tell the New York Times that drug shortages have forced them to make tough choices about limiting which patients get optimal….
Continue ReadingAt least 1,000 patients died in U.S. dental care in last 5 years
Let the patient beware is an adage that may need to be extended to yet another realm of healthcare: dentistry. Kudos to a reporting team in Texas for their recently published investigation, disclosing that dentists all too frequently are involved in procedures in which their patients die and that ineffectual regulators fail to halt dodgy….
Continue ReadingWhen Malpractice Starts with a Doctor’s Mouth
A northern Virginia man successfully sued a doctor for defamation and medical malpractice, earlier this month receiving a judgment of $500,000 for the serious – and, frankly, weird – ethical and medical harm he suffered during a colonoscopy. The case is weird because “defamation” is something plaintiffs who are medically harmed don’t often claim, and….
Continue Reading“Distracted Doctoring” Puts Patients at Risk and Practitioners in Trouble
When you’re anesthetized and under the knife in an operating room, you assume your surgical team is concentrating on you, not texting on an iPad. For one heart patient, however, that assumption was wrong. Pacific Standard Magazine’s unsettling review of distractions during medical procedures described the circumstances of a malpractice case in Texas when a….
Continue ReadingDoctor’s Conviction Goes Far Beyond Mere Malpractice
Propofol is a surgical anesthetic safely used only in a hospital operating room or a comparably equipped medical facility with continuous monitoring of the patient’s heart rate and breathing. The idea of using propofol as a sleep aid in a private home, with a doctor occasionally looking in? Unthinkable, before Michael Jackson’s death. Now Dr…..
Continue ReadingAwake by Mistake During Surgery: a Patient’s Nightmare
No surgical patient wants to experience, or remember, the details of their operation, and the drugs given to put patients to sleep generally work nicely to create a blank slate in the mind for anything that happened after the anesthesiologist told the patient to start counting backward. But not always. As many as 1 in….
Continue ReadingMalpractice in the Operating Room: Who Is Responsible?
It was supposed to be a routine hernia operation. But then the surgeon ordered the anesthesiologist to give the patient a blood-thinning drug. The anesthesiologist, who wasn’t familiar with the drug, injected the drug directly into the patient’s i.v. line, as soon as the surgeon ordered it. That was a double mistake, and it started….
Continue ReadingVancouver pain clinic accused of medical malpractice for excessive opiate prescribing
A wrongful death and medical malpractice lawsuit has been filed against a Vancouver, Wa., pain clinic by four plaintiffs who allege the clinic prescribed excessive amounts of pain medications, causing overdose deaths and addictions. The estates of two patients who died of opiate overdoses are suing Vancouver Payette Clinic in Clark County, Wa., circuit court,….
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