Why No One is Talking About Surgical Errors

Smartphones are everywhere these days, it seems, and more and more individuals are using them to record interactions with doctors. Many might remember a case in June of 2015, when a Virginia man was awarded $500,000 after recording his doctor mocking and insulting him during a medical procedure that was performed in 2013. Such smartphone […]

Errors in diagnosis are the top cause for medical malpractice lawsuits in the United States. Despite these staggering statistics, diagnostic errors have not been the subject of attention in Chicago the way that other malpractice issues, such as hospital-acquired infections, obstetrical negligence and medication errors have. Dr. Gordon Schiff, a faculty member at Harvard Medical […]

A recent report found in the Journal of Patient Safety states that between 210,000 and 440,000 patients die in U.S. hospitals every year due to preventable medical error. This figure would make medical mistakes more deadly to Americans than both heart disease and cancer. A personal injury lawyer in Chicago understands that figures this high […]

Transvaginal mesh lawsuits continue to play out in courts of law around the country and the world, with several significant settlements reached in the past few weeks. Last month, Johnson and Johnson (J&J) quietly settled three mesh injury cases with women who had gone to the same doctor and used the same healthcare system. All […]

Medical devices must obtain approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before they can enter the marketplace. Like prescription drugs, over-the-counter medications, and dietary supplements, the product must be approved for a specific purpose. Nonetheless, doctors are allowed to use medical devices in any way that they see fit, including “off-label” uses that […]

Medtronic recently announced that it was recalling about 15,000 of its guidewires – a heart device that is inserted through an artery and used to guide other devices (such as stents) into place and hold open blocked arteries – after the company received reports of four complaints, including one patient who went into cardiac arrest […]

Boston Scientific Corp. and its subsidiaries — Guidant LLC, Guidant Sales LLC and Cardiac Pacemakers Inc. — have agreed to pay $30 million to settle allegations that it sold defective heart devices. The lawsuit accuses Guidant, which was purchased by Boston Scientific in 2006, of knowingly selling defective implantable defibrillators between 2002 and 2006 to […]

Laser skin procedures, such as laser hair removal and wrinkle reduction procedures, have become increasingly popular in recent years. Patients appreciate the relative ease and convenience with which they can get laser skin procedures, with many procedures only taking a matter of minutes to perform. Unfortunately, laser skin procedures are not always safe and there […]

Cardiac stents – implants used to prop open a patient’s arteries – are one of the most common medical devices, and they are implanted into millions of Americans each year. In fact, over the past decade, cardiac stents have been inserted into 7 million Americans at a cost of more than $110 billion. Cardiac stents […]