Massachusetts updates in category: Medical Malpractice

The medical malpractice suit filed by the family of an Orange County girl revived after doctors allegedly declared her dead in 200 is slated to begin on Monday. The girl was 20 months old when she...

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In the summer of 2001, I tried a landmark case in Worcester, Massachusetts. I represented the family of a young man with hemophilia that died from receiving clotting concentrate infected with the...

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This past week, I attended an Injury Board conference. I enjoyed meeting member lawyers from other parts of the country. One of the persitent laments during the week was the increasing difficulty in...

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Why should anyone fall seven times in a nursing home??Seems like a reasonable question...one asked by a client of ours when his mother died after seven falls from her wheelchair. Unfortunately, the decedent had never been evaluated as a fall risk, nor had the client been consulted about a possible safety restraint, known as a "lap buddy" that could have prevented the death.When you admit a...

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My own personal experience this weekend served to remind me how and why it is so difficult to get jurors in medical negligence cases to appreciate and acknowledge the concept of preventable medical error.My mother in law is battling an agressive lymphoma and received last chance chemotherapy treatments over the weekend. The care she received from her caregivers was compassionate and remarkable....

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A Worcester Superior Court jury awarded $2.5 million in damages to a Massachusetts woman misdiagnosed with HIV. She was given a powerful array of drug treatments for nearly nine years before discovering she was misdiagnosed.The malpractice lawsuit alleged the doctor, at University of Massachusetts Medical Center, failed to order the proper tests to confirm the diagnosis even after several blood...

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Protecting charitable organizations from liability for the negligence of the organization or its employees, may sound noble, but is in fact, unfair. The immunity doesn't really accomplish its goals, and insures that employees of an organization involved in a personal injury lawsuit, will be sued instead of the organization. Here's the way it works in Massachusetts. By statute, M.G.L. c. 231,...

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The problem of medication errors has by now been well-reviewed, and efforts to minimize such errors are underway in hospitals and doctors' offices across the country. Nevertheless, the problem of medication errors has proven to be a very stubborn one. In his groundbreaking book, "To Err is Human," Lucien Leape, M.D., estimated that medication errors caused approximately 98,000 deaths per year....

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A couple of weeks ago, a Suffolk County Superior Court jury in Boston, rejected the claim of former New England Patriots offensive coordinator, Charlie Weis, that doctors botched his gastric bypass surgery. The defense verdict came at the end of the second trial of the case. The first jury hearing the case was deadlocked, leading to a mistrial. Weis had claimed that his surgeons allowed...

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I wonder if anyone has ever calculated the number of words per hour spoken during the average jury trial. The right words, used the right way, can evoke the most powerful of images, associations, and emotions. Words can also drone on and become little more than background noise to the listener. The lawyer trying a case involving catastrophic personal injury, has a challenge. He may need to...

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An article in Saturday's Boston Globe illustrated the gap that sometimes exists between written procedures and implementation. The article also highlighted the ongoing danger from surgeries on the wrong part of a patient's body. Five hundred fifty-two cases of wrong-site surgery have been reported by American hospitals since 1995; there are undoubtedly many unreported cases. The incident covered...

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On Tuesday, a jury found against Notre Dame Football coach Charlie Weis, in his medical malpractice lawsuit. The suit claimed two doctors botched his after-care following gastric bypass surgery five years ago. The jury reached their decision in less than a day, finding two Massachusetts General Hospital surgeons were not negligent.Weis, 51, claimed the surgeons were negligent for allowing him to...

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Imagine a plane crash in which the co-pilot knew of another plane on a collision course, but decided not to tell the pilot, figuring he'd get the information on his own. Imagine a firefighter knowing a roof is about to collapse, but failing to warn his colleagues because he thought his colleagues were highly skilled and the signs of impending collapse were obvious. Unthinkable? Of course. Yet,...

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This week's Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly newspaper reported a defendant's verdict in a sad case. The plaintiff had suffered a massive stroke leaving him paralyzed on half of his body and with other terrible deficits. The allegation was that the stroke was caused due to mismanagement of lung surgery following pneumonia. The case was tried by an attorney considered to be a very fine plaintiff's...

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A doctor can no more afford to ignore clues provided by his patient, than a homicide detective can fail to dust the crime scene for fingerprints. The best internists would undoubtedly make great detectives. When the body provides clues that something is not working properly, the doctor must follow the clues until he diagnoses the cause of the troubling symptom. In fairness to physicians, the...

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