Medical Malpractice | Denver Trial Attorney Blog | Leventhal Puga Braley P.C. - Part 3
Why a Surgeon May Be Responsible for Your Infection
Surgeries can range from just a quick cut to incredibly invasive and physically traumatic. In every surgery, you hope that the surgeon mas made sure their tools and operating room have been properly cleaned and sterilized before they begin. After all, given how dirty hospitals can become, surgeons and nurses need to be careful to not allow bacteria and viruses to be introduced into their patient’s bodies. Sadly, some surgeons are incredibly negligent, and their negligence allows for deadly surgical infections. Read the rest »
Medical Device Misconnection: the Wrong Tube Can Kill
Our last blog article dealt with medication administration errors—when medication is delivered to patients through the wrong route. (For example, something that was meant to be taken orally is infused into an IV drip.) Now, we’ll be homing in on how doctors and nurses make these mistakes: with medical device misconnections. Read the rest »
How Doctors Administer Medication (and Why It Matters)
Drugs serve many roles in a healthcare setting. They can be used to treat a disease, ease suffering, supply a missing substance, encourage a bodily reaction, or induce unconsciousness. But in the United States, delivering the right drugs to the right patients is a process beset with medication errors. Read the rest »
Misdiagnosis: Commonplace in the United States
According to a study of the U.S. population in the British Medical Journal’s Quality & Safety publication, the number of adult outpatients misdiagnosed each year is both underreported… and estimated to be more than 5%. That’s one out of every twenty patients in the United States. In no fewer than half of those cases, the misdiagnoses led to serious health consequences, such as the advancement of a disease like cancer, or death. Read the rest »
Kentucky Woman Wins $8.2 Million Verdict
A 35-year-old Kentucky mother went to St. Elizabeth Hospital in Edgewood with the worst headache of her life. The emergency room doctor ordered a CT exam to evaluate her headache. The CT showed evidence of a brain bleed, but the scan was misread by the radiologist. Another test was required, but instead the ER doctor told her it was just a migraine, and sent her on her way. Twelve days later, a blood vessel burst in her brain, and the woman was paralyzed from the neck down, unable to speak. An undetected brain aneurysm was to blame. Read the rest »
When Doctors Work for the Drug Company
All over the country, stories have come to light about healthcare providers receiving kickbacks and other financial incentives to recommend certain testing labs or prescribe drugs made by a particular manufacturer. Not only is this a horrendous ethical violation that can put lives in danger, it also violates federal and state laws. Drug companies and labs have made huge profits off the illnesses they claim to care about, and some doctors have helped them and profited from these practices. Read the rest »
“Never Events” Are Always Happening
What Are Never Events?
So-called never events are medical mistakes so egregious that they are never supposed to happen. Since never events are not natural complications of medical procedures, they are, by definition, avoidable. As such, never events are almost always grounds for a medical malpractice lawsuit. Read the rest »
How Common Is Medical Malpractice?
A 2016 study released by Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers found that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States. Read the rest »