Maryland Medical Malpractice Lawyer Blog

A New York surgeon has settled a medical malpractice case for $1.9. The Plaintiff was only 16 when doctors found a lesion on one of his ribs, more than seven years ago. The tumor was removed in 2001, but the hospital's attending pediatric surgeon allegedly failed to get all of it. Despite assurances to the contrary, the tissue turned out to be cancerous and spread to three other ribs, said the lawyer. The man had to undergo additional surgeries, radiation treatment, and now is at greater risk for reoccurrence of his cancer. A copy of the article regarding the case can be found here.

I have successfully handled a number of medical malpractice / medical negligence / medical error cases in Baltimore and other counties in Maryland, and in the District of Columbia, involving a failure to timely diagnose and treat cancer. In cases involving tumor resection, it is critical for the surgeon to make sure that what is removed is greater than the area of the tumor’s margin. This is the standard of care in these cases.

It is now possible for patients to compare the care received at hospitals in Maryland and the District of Columbia. This can be useful in determining whether certain Maryland and Washington D.C. hospitals have a higher incidence of medical malpractice. As reported today in a leading newspaper, consumers can now search a website and compare local hospitals to see how they stack up against each other. A copy of the article regarding this issue can be found here.

Last year, the United States Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released a comparison of death rates for heart failure and heart attacks, noting how hospitals compared with the national average — better, worse or no different — without releasing the death rates themselves. This year the agency disclosed that information to consumers. The website contains statistics on what percentage of a hospital's patients get appropriate care for a variety of ailments, including childhood asthma, and 10 measures of patient satisfaction with the hospital experience. Knowing a hospital's death rates also gives consumers the ability to decide where they want to be treated, and where medical malpractice is more prevalent. Click here to search the database.

I have successfully handled a number of medical malpractice cases involving doctors (surgeons usually) injuring an artery or vein during a surgical procedure. For example, in one severe injury case, a spinal / orthopedic surgeon was installing hardware on the cervical spine of a woman who had cervical disk (disc) disease, when he hit an artery with a drill and caused the woman to have a severe stroke. The storke caused the woman to have a lifetime of medical and other care expenses as a result of the surgeon’s negligence.

In another case, a woman who had a long history of peripheral vascular disease underwent a bypass of the blood vessells of her lower leg, called a fem-pop (femoral to popliteal) bypass. After the surgery, the woman complained to her doctor of excessive bleeding from the surgical wound site. The surgeon negligently said not to worry about it, and told the woman that if she kept on bleeding she should put her finger on the wound to stop the bleeding. Unfortunately, when the woman went to sleep that night, the wound really opened up and she bled profusely. She woke up covered in blood and screaming, causing her family to rush to her rescue. Unfortunately, she could not reach medical treatment in time and bled to death (exsanguinated).

A Tennessee man has obtained a $1.5 million verdict in a medical malpractice / medical negligence lawsuit against a doctor. The man lost his leg due to an infection after a bypass surgery in the leg. According to the man, “I'm just hoping that I can get the word out (so) that it doesn't happen to anyone else.”

Apparently, the doctor performed bypass surgery on the man’s left leg. The man subsequently went back to the doctor multiple times and reported that he was experiencing fevers and chills. The doctor said the man had the flu. It turned out that the man had a bacterial infection had spread into his left leg, which caused doctors to have to amputate the leg due to the infection. A copy of the article regarding the case can be found here.

I have successfully handled a number of medical malpractice / medical negligence / medical error cases involving infection to arms and legs, some causing death and some causing amputation of limbs. These cases are tragic because the patient usually has a condition that can and is being treated with the expectation that the patient will resume a normal life. In cases involving Infections in arms and legs, it is always critical for the doctor or hospital to pay close attention to any signs or symptoms of infection (redness, swelling, warmth, unusual pain, etc.), and place the patient on antibiotics if there is any sign of infection, before the infection progresses from the limb to the body (sepsis). Doctors must err on the side of caution in treating these patients. Otherwise, loss of limb and even loss of life can occur.

A Tennessee man has obtained a $1.5 million verdict in a medical malpractice / medical negligence lawsuit against a doctor. The man lost his leg due to an infection after a bypass surgery in the leg. According to the man, “I'm just hoping that I can get the word out (so) that it doesn't happen to anyone else.”

Apparently, the doctor performed bypass surgery on the man’s left leg. The man subsequently went back to the doctor multiple times and reported that he was experiencing fevers and chills. The doctor said the man had the flu. It turned out that the man had a bacterial infection had spread into his left leg, which caused doctors to have to amputate the leg due to the infection. A copy of the article regarding the case can be found here.

I have successfully handled a number of medical malpractice / medical negligence / medical error cases involving infection to arms and legs, some causing death and some causing amputation of limbs. These cases are tragic because the patient usually has a condition that can and is being treated with the expectation that the patient will resume a normal life. In cases involving Infections in arms and legs, it is always critical for the doctor or hospital to pay close attention to any signs or symptoms of infection (redness, swelling, warmth, unusual pain, etc.), and place the patient on antibiotics if there is any sign of infection, before the infection progresses from the limb to the body (sepsis). Doctors must err on the side of caution in treating these patients. Otherwise, loss of limb and even loss of life can occur.

A new study has found that most personal injury plaintiffs who decided to pass up a settlement offer and went to trial ended up getting less money then if they settled their injury case prior to trial. A copy of an article regarding the study can be found here.

While the results of that study may hold true for many lawyers, my experience as a medical malpractice lawyer in Maryland and the District of Columbia has been the opposite. For almost 20 years, I have been a civil trial lawyer handling complex litigation. Most of the matters I work on are catastrophic injury (medical malpractice, wrongful death, product liability, major collisions) and business litigation matters. I handle approximately a dozen such litigation matters a year. In the overwhelming majority of these cases, I have been successful for my clients. During my entire career, a few clients’ cases have been thrown out of court and have lost a few trials (I can recall approximately three defense verdicts), but I have been successful in more than 90% of the cases that I have pursued. This includes many trials where the defense offered either nothing prior to trial or a minimal settlement offer, resulting in my taking the case to trial and getting a million dollar plus verdict. A list of some of my verdicts can be found here.

While no lawyer wins every case, the above-referenced study shows that my success rate is unusually high, which I believe is due to enjoying what I do, limiting the number of cases I handle, picking the right cases to handle, carefully working up my cases before trial and working very hard. I don’t say any of this to be conceited, but to demonstrate how concentrating in a field of law and adhering to the above-referenced practices can significantly help a client avoid the results of that study.

A California jury has awarded $8.5 million to the widow of a man who died on the day a surgeon was going to discharge him from the hospital. Because of limits on medical malpractice cases, the woman probably will receive only $1.6 million of that amount.

The 49-year-old man broke six ribs in a motorcycle accident in 2002. At the trial, his wife’s attorneys argued that a doctor should have more closely monitored him after x-rays showed he had one gallon of liquid backed up in his stomach four hours before he died, and he had previously been resuscitated. The man died after choking on his own vomit. A copy of the article regarding the case can be found here.

I have successfully handled a number of medical malpractice / medical negligence / medical error cases in Baltimore and other counties in Maryland involving premature hospital discharge / improper discharge from a hospital. These cases have ranged from failure to properly diagnose and treat infections / sepsis, failure to diagnose and treat pulmonary embolisms, failure to properly diagnose and treat surgical complications, failure to diagnose and treat heart attacks, failure to diagnose and properly treat brain injuries, etc. Sometimes these cases arise soon before discharge or right after. These cases are always tragic because the patient and family trust the doctor and hospital to do the right thing and, as a result, they are usually given a false sense of security in the planning of the discharge or the actual discharge itself. Many times, the patient and/or family’s concerns are dismissed and they are reassured that everything will be fine and the patient will get better. A death within days of a planned or actual discharge should always be carefully investigated.

A New York trial judge has ordered a new trial on damages in the malpractice case of a businessman left permanently paralyzed after a stroke. The plaintiff was awarded $5 million in April after a jury trial. The judge, however, set aside the verdict last week with respect to damages, finding that the award was too low. The judge then entered judgment for approximately $18.4 million. Specifically, the judge found that the jury’s award of $1 million each for past and future pain and suffering to the plaintiff and his family deviated materially from what would be fair compensation, and thus increased the award to $5 million each. The plaintiff contended in the case that doctors at a hospital failed to diagnose what they called “classic symptoms” of a brain aneurysm that led to the stroke. A copy of the article regarding the case can be found here.

In Maryland, whether in medical malpractice cases or otherwise, it is possible for judges to increase or decrease a jury verdict, but it is very rare that judges increase such verdicts. It is practically unheard of for judges to increase a verdict so much.

A Missouri jury awarded $2.58 million this week to a couple in a medical malpractice case where a retiree got a staph infection and lost his right leg, part of his left foot, a kidney and some hearing. The jury than awarded $513,000 to the wife of the man, who quit her job to help care for her husband for the last four years. The jury found the doctor and the hospital liable for causing the man to suffer 15 surgeries, 84 days in hospitals, 137 visits to doctor's offices, brain damage and having to learn to walk again with a prosthesis.

The man had a pacemaker installed and then was discharged several days later. The next month, he became sick and was diagnosed at another hospital with the infection. The infection led doctors there to remove the pacemaker, at which time they found golf-ball size masses of infection in his body. The plaintiff alleged that the defendant doctor installed the pacemaker even though there was redness on the right wrist of the patient from an IV, and the installation became the conduit for the infection to spread. A copy of the article regarding the case can be found here.

I have handled a number of medical malpractice cases where the issue was whether the doctor and hospital failed to timely diagnose and treat an infection and/or sepsis. Some of these have resulted in multi-million dollar settlements or verdicts. These cases are usually very sad because they usually involve repeated instances in which the doctor or hospital ignores clear signs of infection and/or sepsis, which is documented by the medical records. They also are extremely troubling cases because the person is usually otherwise healthy but suffers severe injuries due to the infection, or even death. These cases are always complicated because the allegation usually is not that the doctor or hospital caused the infection (which is usually very hard to prove, but which was the issue in the case above), but that the doctor and hospital failed to treat an infection that was there. Proving that the doctor or hospital caused the infection is usually very difficult.