This is a fascinating opinion. Defendants in medical negligence cases try to argue that, say, because a bowel is perforated in 15 in 10,000 cases of a certain surgery it was not negligent to perforate the bowel in the subject surgery. The Supreme Court of Virginia just ruled that that…
Articles Posted in Medical Negligence
Medical Negligence Judgments Increasing? No – Not Even As Much As Medical Inflation
There is yet another article that provides more data undermining the alleged need for restrictions on the right of patients to sue negligent health care providers. According to the abstract of a study published in Health Affairs “we used data from the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) to study the…
Pharmacist Liability
The Fourth District Court of Appeals in Florida has ruled that a pharmacist may be held liable for failure to follow the standard of care for pharmacists even though the pharmacist dispensed drugs pursuant to a doctor’s order. The plaintiff alleged that the pharmacist should have intervened to stop the…
The Distinction Between Informed Consent and Battery Cases
The distinction between a lack of informed consent case and a pure medical battery case is set out in Blanchard v. Kellum, 975 S.W.2d 522 (Tenn. 1998). An informed consent case requires expert proof as to the standard of care (or recognized standard of acceptable professional practice) of similar medical…
No Error Leaving Defense Counsel on Med Mal Jury
The Texas Supreme Court has held that it is not error for a judge to permit a lawyer who regularly represents defendants in medical negligence cases to sit on a medical neligence jury. The lawyer/juror candidly admitted that he would tend to relate to the defense lawyers in the case…
Interesting Med Mal Decision in New York
The highest court of New York has rejected in part the medical negligence claim of a woman who sued a doctor and others for emotional distress but permitted the claim of the child to go forward. The mother claimed that the doctor told her that the seven week old fetus…
Medical Malpractice Insurance Crisis is “Over”
Those of us who have lived through a couple of the so-called medical malpractice insurance crises knew it was just a matter of time before the market softened. The time has come. The industry has declared that the insurance crisis is over. Read this fascinating article. Of course, the facts…
Informed Consent A Jury Question
The Supreme Court of North Dakota has ruled that whether or not a reasonable patient would accept the risk of death from a procedure is a jury question and not one for which expert testimony is necessary. The plaintiff’s wife died after an IVP. The doctors admitted that they did…
Source for Medical Images – Free
GE’s Standard Edition of Medcyclopedia includes at no charge all text and images from The Encyclopaedia of Medical Imaging’s eight book volumes: Physics, Techniques and Procedures, Normal Anatomy, Musculoskeletal and Soft Tissue Imaging, Gastrointestinal and Urogenital Imaging, Chest and Cardiovascular Imaging, Neuroradiology and Head and Neck Imaging, and Paediatric Imaging.…
Pro-Plaintiff Opinion from Sixth Circuit
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a ruling of the trial judge excluding certain experts in a medical negligence case, stating that Daubert’s role of ensuring that the courtroom door remains closed to junk science is not served by the exclusion of testimony supported by relevant experience. The Court…