Some of those who read this blog live in Arizona. We have no caps on the recovery an injured patient can make, although the legislature has taken away other patient rights in an attempt to make it more difficult for an injured patient to win a malpractice suit. For those of you in other states, many of you are subject to caps on malpractice awards. In those states, no matter how badly you are injured or what the jury awards you, the jury award will be reduced to the cap amount for your state. Some of those caps are only…
Continue Reading Medical Malpractice Tort Reform Is A Fraud

When a loved one dies as the result of the fault of another, Arizona law provides a remedy in the form of its wrongful death statutes. Unlike most personal injuries, the common law of England, from which our personal injury law descends, did not recognize death as an injury for which those left behind could sue and recover damages. As a result, legislatures, including Arizona’s, passed wrongful death statutes to create a remedy. Since wrongful death claims are a creature of statute, they vary from state to state and depend entirely on the provisions of the wrongful death statute of…
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“You have a good medical malpractice case.”

These are seven words you never want me or any other medical malpractice lawyer to tell you. The reason is that every “good” medical malpractice case involves a catastrophic injury or death.

Juries are human. Humans avoid things which make them uncomfortable. Knowing that the medical professionals to whom we entrust our lives and those of our loved ones make mistakes that kill and injure people on a regular basis is deeply disturbing. Because of this deep-seated need to believe in doctors and hospitals, juries are reluctant to find against them in malpractice…
Continue Reading The Seven Words You Never Want To Hear

Every day it seems we learn more about the many life forms that live inside our bodies. Viruses, bacteria, and fungi all live inside us and have the power to greatly affect our health. In addition to the gut microbiome that seems to get all the attention, there is a mouth microbiome which has only recently begun to be closely studied.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly forms of cancer. In its earliest stages, when it is most susceptible to treatment, it has few symptoms and is only rarely discovered. When…
Continue Reading Reduce Your Risk of Pancreatic Cancer

What would you do if you ran a business that regularly had trials with millions of dollars potentially at stake and you needed to hire a lawyer to try those cases for you? How would you go about selecting that lawyer. I can pretty much guarantee that you wouldn’t choose based on seeing someone’s picture on a highway billboard or on the side of a bus.

This is the problem faced by medical malpractice insurance companies. They insure lots of doctors. They promise to defend those doctors, if they get sued, and to pay any…
Continue Reading The Defense Malpractice Attorney

Anesthesia injuries do not occur very often, but, when they do, they can be devastating.

There are two basic types of anesthesia, local and general. Local anesthesia is, as the name implies, delivered locally to the area of the intended surgery. While things can and do go wrong with local anesthesia, the damage is not usually catastrophic. General anesthesia is where things can go really wrong.

There are four main parts to general anesthesia: Sedation, analgesia, amnesia, and muscle paralysis. The anesthesiologist sedates the patient to relax him and to reduce anxiety. Analgesia is the reduction of…
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Frankly, you should hope that you never get a firsthand chance to find out the answer to this question. A medical malpractice trial is a high stakes gamble in which hundreds of thousands of dollars are at risk and your fate is in the hands of eight strangers, who are probably quite skeptical about your claim.

A medical malpractice trial is the culmination of a process that has been going on for one to two years already. Your lawyer has investigated your claim and concluded it is meritorious. He or she has…
Continue Reading What Happens In A Medical Malpractice Trial?

Heart disease is a disease of aging. If you live long enough, your heart, the hardest working muscle in your body, will begin to show signs of wear and tear. If you don’t take good care of it, you won’t have to wait until you are elderly for your heart to give you trouble.

Heart disease is the most common cause of death among men and women of most ethnic groups. Sometimes heart disease has a strong genetic component and there is not much we can do to change our parents and…
Continue Reading Good Heart Health Benefits The Entire Body

When a prospective client calls me, quite often I can tell as soon as I hear the facts that this is not going to be a case I can take. The patient was too sick to survive the treatment, or it is unclear who did what, or the statute of limitations has already run, or the injury was too small, etc. There are many reasons that may be clear right away why I cannot take a case. However, if the case sounds promising, I will begin an investigation.

It takes time to investigate a…
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When medical malpractice occurs, doctors face an ethical test. Medical ethics require a doctor to be honest with the patient. If the doctor knows that he has made a mistake which injured his patient, is he going to be honest with the patient and tell him the truth or is he going to hide the mistake?

As early as 1847, American Medical Association promulgated a Code of Ethics setting forth the principles of conduct expected of all physicians. Although specific aspects of the Code have changed over the years, the general principle of…
Continue Reading To Tell Or Not To Tell

As The Boss, Bruce Springsteen, famously observed, “They tempt you, Sir, with silver. They tempt you, Sir, with gold. They tempt you with the pleasures that the flesh does surely hold.” Temptation is all around us and healthcare providers are no more immune to it than the rest of us. As if we needed any more reminders that those we entrust with our healthcare are human and subject to all the frailties of the human soul, we see these stories from the news.

A Massachusetts doctor has agreed to plead guilty to defrauding Medicare…
Continue Reading More Healthcare Providers Behaving Badly

I wish I could take every case presented to me in which the doctor or nurse or other healthcare provider committed malpractice. I would be an even busier attorney because there is so much malpractice. At least 50% of the cases I see involve malpractice which caused some harm to the patient. While technically that is enough to support a lawsuit, standing alone it is not enough to make for an economically viable medical malpractice lawsuit. An economically viable medical malpractice case is the only one that can be brought. Because of the expense of a malpractice suit, an economically…
Continue Reading The Economics of a Medical Malpractice Case

Last week I discussed “standard of care,” one of the three essential elements of a medical malpractice claim. In addition to proving a breach of the standard of care, a patient plaintiff must also prove that the breach caused her to be damaged. Causation is a difficult element and one which confers an advantage upon healthcare providers who get sued.

Cause in a medical malpractice case must be what the law calls “proximate cause.” As set forth in the Arizona jury instructions for medical negligence, “Negligence causes an…
Continue Reading Proving Causation in a Medical Malpractice Case: Another Advantage for Defendants