I was going to title this post “How to Choose a New Doctor” but that doesn’t happen very much any more. Long gone are the days when a person chose a doctor and received most of his or her health care from that doctor over a period of many years. Today’s health care is fragmented so that patients may see multiple different doctors in different specialties over the course of just a short period of time. Even the process of selecting a primary care physician is different now with managed care and hospital chains buying up private practices. Today, you
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Latest from Sandweg & Ager, P.C. - Page 10
Prostate Cancer
Prostate cancer can be aggressive or slow-growing. It may not be easy to distinguish between the two and there is a substantial risk of overtreatment.
After skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer among men. One in seven men will develop prostate cancer and, if a man has a family history of prostate cancer, his risk is even greater. Furthermore, the older a man gets, the greater the risk that he will develop prostate cancer.
While there have been advances in detection, monitoring and treating prostate cancer, because of its location, it remains a difficult cancer
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Pay Me Now Or Pay Me Later
Maybe you remember the old television advertisement in which the auto mechanic told the audience that they could pay him now to install a new oil filter or they could pay him later when their car broke down due to dirty oil. That ad hasn’t been on television for over 40 years now but the concept is applicable to the debate about how we should pay for healthcare.
Regular readers of this blog know that the United States is the only nation in the industrialized world that does not have universal health care. The reasons are rooted in our history
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Acute Compartment Syndrome
Unrecognized or improperly treated acute compartment syndrome can cause serious injury, including limb loss and even death. As a result, it is the underlying medical condition in many medical malpractice lawsuits.
Our bodies have a number of muscle compartments, which are separated by fascia, a tough, inelastic, fibrous sheet. Acute compartment syndrome occurs when swelling creates pressure inside one of the compartments. The inelasticity of the fascia surrounding the compartment prevents the pressure from escaping. If the pressure reaches a certain point, it prevents or severely reduces the ability of the body to deliver blood to the compartment. The absence
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State Medical Boards Continue To Fail The Public – Part 2
I always advise people looking for a doctor or getting ready to have surgery to check the web site of the state medical board to see if the doctor has been disciplined and, if so, for what reason. Unfortunately, this is only an effective strategy if the medical board is diligent about tracking and publishing information about doctor misconduct or malpractice and many state boards are less than diligent.
Last week I wrote about the problem of medical boards being reluctant to discipline doctors for malpractice or other bad conduct. When they do finally discipline a doctor, it is not
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State Medical Boards Continue To Fail The Public – Part 1
Reuters recently released the results of a lengthy investigation into practices of the Justice Department which permit accused fraudsters and malpracticing doctors to buy their way out of trouble and continue to practice in return for payment of a civil settlement amount. While such settlements may be in the best interests of the United States as a way to recoup amounts improperly paid to these doctors, the public is not usually informed of them and the doctors are not disciplined by their local medical boards. This is an outrage.
Over the last ten years, Reuters found that there were many,
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Social Media And Plastic Surgery – A Dangerous Mix
Today’s story is about a plastic surgeon who courted social media and had a large following. She called herself Dr. Roxy and even live-streamed some procedures and answered viewer’s questions during the surgeries. She has been sued at least 11 times and may lose her medical license. As matters stand now, that license has been suspended by the Ohio Medical Board for poor care during social media performances and during routine office and surgical care.
Plastic surgery, indeed all surgery, is a delicate craft. It requires great attention to detail. A slip here or a distracted cut there can cause
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The Most Dangerous Operation
What is the price of beauty? If you think that beauty includes a well-shaped rear end, the answer may be your life. According to the statistics, the Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL), a form of gluteoplasty also known as gluteal fat grafting, is the most dangerous operation. While breast augmentation has a death rate of about one in 72,000, BBL has one death in every 3,000 or 4,000 procedures. Despite a number of suggested changes to make the procedure safer, it has proved very resistant with death rates remaining unacceptably high.
Image of trochar and cannula used in BBL procedures.
The
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Beware The Medication Error
Medication errors are some of the most common preventable medical mistakes. They occur in hospitals, doctor’s offices, pharmacies, and in the patient’s home. The consequence of a medication error can range from insignificant to catastrophic injury to death. Although a great deal of progress has been made in reducing the incidence of medication errors, they remain a persistent problem.
We have all heard the term “miracle drug” and there are many drugs that work what would certainly have been considered miracles only a hundred years ago. As with so many things in life, however, the advent of the miracle drug
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Unethical Doctors
For all their education and obvious talents, some doctors just can’t resist their worst impulses. You should keep this in mind when you look for a doctor or when receiving advice from a doctor where the doctor stands to benefit, if you follow the advice. As I have said many times, just because a doctor says it does not make it so.
Health care in the United States is a multi-billion dollar industry. Some doctors believe they are entitled to more than just the money they can earn taking care of patients.
Unnecessary Treatments
This is a classic and time-tested
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Large Medical Malpractice Verdicts Usually Have Some Things In Common.
You read about them in the papers, if you still read the paper. More likely you hear about them on line or on your favorite cable news show. They are the large medical malpractice verdicts. Depending on the politics of the source of your news, the large verdicts may be reported with awe, derision, compassion for those injured, or outrage that a jury could award such an amount. If you look closely, you will see that these verdicts almost always share certain characteristics.
A Catastrophic Injury or Death
Before a jury will award a large sum of money, there has
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Nurses Get The Short End Of The Stick.
It is never easy to be a nurse serving on the front lines of health care delivery. Nurses know this. Perhaps you have seen the stories about the number of nurses leaving the profession. The reasons for their leaving are many and reflect poorly on our health care system. We might be able to get along pretty well without venture capitalists but we can’t get along without a sufficient number of competent nurses.
There are two interrelated factors that are cited most frequently by nurses who are leaving the profession or thinking about it. Burnout/Overwork and pay. The Covid pandemic
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The Greedy Doctor
Over and over again, I have recommended that people considering surgery take a close look at the credentials of the surgeon, who is being considered for the operation. This is especially true in the case of plastic surgery. Any licensed doctor can hold himself or herself out as a plastic surgeon. Patients need to make sure their “plastic surgeon” has received training in plastic surgery and is not just claiming to be one. As I also point out, however, while making sure the doctor is properly trained and credentialed cannot guarantee that the patient won’t be the victim of medical
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Why Won’t Doctors Tell The Truth?
Medicine is an honorable profession. Most of the people who are doctors are good people, who do good work, and who are honest and have high moral standards. That is why it is so disappointing that, when medical malpractice happens, honesty and high moral standards seem to go out the window.
I have been representing people injured by medical malpractice for over 40 years now. It has been my almost universal experience that when a patient is hurt by medical malpractice, the doctor says two things. (1) I did nothing wrong; and (2) Nothing I did or didn’t do caused
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Doctors Need Help, Cue the Robots
One of the most fertile fields for malpractice is the humble diagnosis. Errors in diagnosis lead doctors down the wrong path and result in either no treatment for a serious condition or a delay in treatment. The best available evidence is that fully one-third of malpractice cases result from either misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis. I am surprised it is not more than that. I see it all the time in my practice. The patient sent home from the emergency department with chest pains that the doctor did not think were cardiac in nature. The spot on the x-ray that the
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A Large Verdict Following a Disastrous Birth
An Iowa jury awarded nearly $100 million in damages to the parents of a child catastrophically injured during childbirth and to the child himself. As is often the case in these verdicts, almost half of the money was to pay for future medical and custodial care for the child, who is and will be unable to care for himself. The rest was awarded to the child and his parents for the general damages, pain and suffering, and loss of future earnings resulting from the botched birth.
The laboring mother came to the hospital to deliver her baby boy. When the
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