A heartfelt thanks to Lexmonitor, a daily review of law blogs and journals, for these kind words about my post discussing testimony by podiatrists.
Tennessee injury lawyer John Day has been blogging for years, and his posts display a keen knowledge of what makes a blog consistently readable and valuable to your readership. This post analyzes a case and provides opinion and questions for the reader – a great example of a blog post that will keep readers coming back.
Economists in personal injury cases and wrongful death cases often consider work life expectancy tables in calculating future economic losses.
As explained on this website, "[m]any laypersons (and some experts) assume that [worklife expectancy] is the number of years until the person turns 65, the historic age for full social security retirement. This assumption is incorrect for two basic reasons: many people retire at different ages (usually earlier) and the average person has some breaks in employment (perhaps involuntary) before retirement."
The factors taken into account in determining work life expectancy are age, gender, education and level of work disability.
The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has issued an opinion upholding the admissibility of an medical doctor’s opinion on causation based on application of traditional differential diagnosis theory.
In Best v. Lowe’s Home Centers, Inc., (No. 08-5924) , _ F.3d _ (6th Cir. April 16, 2009) the court reversed a trial judges opinion to exclude a doctor’s conclusion that the plaintiff’s loss of smell was caused by a chemical spill at defendant’s store.
The court said
According to the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, the Chamber of Commerce is going to start running short films before feature films in movie theaters in the Washington, D.C,area. The films "tell a story of supposed “Lawsuit Abuse” — cases in which people were allegedly dragged into the legal system with the filing of a frivolous lawsuit."
From the blog: “’Lawsuit abuse and the harm it brings to everyday Americans and small businesses is one of the great American tragedies,’” says Lisa Rickard, the president of the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform, formerly of Akin, Gump. "’That’s why the silver screen is the perfect venue for these Faces of Lawsuit Abuse short films.’”
After a one month run in DC, the Chamber is going to take the films to select theaters elsewhere in the country.
One medical malpractice insurer, The Doctors Company, has an interesting article on medical malpractice claims concerning pap smears.
Here is a excerpt from the article that discusses the scope of the problem:
To put the potential magnitude of this problem in perspective, a College of American Pathologists (CAP) study of the five-year “look-back” at previous negative Pap smears following the diagnosis of HSIL/carcinoma found that 10 percent of prior smears were false negatives for SIL/carcinoma. If atypical squamous cells of undetermined significance (ASC-US) were included, 20 percent of prior smears were false negatives. In 1996, the American Cancer Society predicted 15,700 new cases of cervical cancer and 4,700 deaths. Published studies indicated that 60–75 percent of women dying from cervical cancer either never had a Pap smear or had not had one in the five years prior to diagnosis. Therefore, if one assumed that 40 percent of the predicted new cases of cervical carcinoma had a single Pap smear in the prior five years with a 20 percent false-negative rate, there was a potential for 1,256 new claims for failure to diagnose cervical carcinoma on a Pap smear in 1996 alone! [Footnotes omitted.]
Ms. Arizona was asked a question about universal health care during her Miss USA pageant interview Her response reminded me of the frequent, mindless sound bites offered by the 2008 GOP candidate for Vice President of the United States.
Watch the video clip here.
Universal health care – I can see it from my house.
Public Citizen ranks Tennessee 40th in its 2008 ranking of serious doctor disciplinary actions taken by state medical licensing boards.
The Tennessee board took a total of 40 serious disciplinary actions against the 18,137 doctors in Tennessee, or a total of 2.44 actions per 1000 physicians. The total leading states were Alaska (6.54 per 1000) and Kentucky (5.87 per 1000). The two states with the lowest rankings were Minnesota (0.95 per 1000) and South Carolina (1.23 per 1000).
In 2006 Tennessee ranked 29th on the list and in 2007 it ranked 28th.
The Wall Street Journal has been writing a series of articles about crashes of medical helicopters. A total of 13 crashes took 29 lives in 2008.
This crashes can give rise to several potential types of claims. The patient has a potential claim, assuming he or she can prove that there was negligence in the operation or maintenance of the helicopter. Assuming that the health care providers are employed by the same entity that owns, operates and maintains the helicopter, they will be limited to a worker’s compensation claim. If a different company flies, owns, or maintains the helicopter, a lawyer should look to see whether the negligence of any of the non-employers contributed to cause the incident. Of course, it is always possible the crash was caused by a defect in the helicopter, the failure of a replacement part, etc.
Let me hasten to add that not every crash will give rise to a lawsuit. For example, the patient who survives a crash may not be able to prove that the crash caused an injury. Or the family of a deceased patient may not be able to show that the patient would have survived the acute illness or trauma the resulted in the air transport of the patient in the first place. A through investigation of each crash is necessary to determine whether the crash was caused by negligence, whether the crash caused an injury or death, and whether the wrongdoer, if any, is protected from liability by worker’s compensation law or some other law.
Many of us know that doctors prescribe drugs for uses other than those approved by the FDA.
This article discusses off-label drug prescribing and suggests that physicians who prescribe a drug for an off-label use follow the following steps to obtain informed consent:
Read the entire article here.
The Idaho Supreme Court has permitted an expert to opine that two defendants in a medical negligence case engaged in not just negligent but reckless conduct.
In Jones v. Crawford, 2009 Opinion 53 (Idaho S. Ct. April 8, 2009), a defendant appealed from an adverse jury verdict in a wrongful death case. Plaintiffs charged that the decedent’s death from an air embolus after spine surgery was a result of the negligent and reckless conduct of the defendants. The trial judge permitted the plaintiff’s experts to opine that the conduct of two of the defendants was reckless.
In affirming the trial judge’s decision to admit the expert testimony on the issue of recklessness, the Idaho Supreme Court said
