Gair, Gair, Conason, Rubinowitz, Bloom, Hershenhorn, Steigman & Mackauf is a New York Plaintiff's personal injury law firm specializing in automobile accidents, construction accidents, medical malpractice, products liability, police misconduct and all types of New York personal injury litigation.

Articles Posted in Medical Malpractice

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surgeryToo many patients requiring complex surgery are suffering the devastating consequences of medical malpractice committed by inexperienced surgeons who negligently performed the surgery.  Some medical experts believe that there should be some type of legal way to prevent patients from undergoing high risk surgeries with inexperienced surgeons in hospitals that handle a low volume of patients. In a recent article in the Washington Post, Sandra G. Boodman writes about a long-running battle known as the volume-outcome debate among medical experts. This debate was recently re-activated by the decision of John Hopkins, Dartmouth-Hitchcock and University of Michigan to require surgeons practicing specific types of high risk surgery to meet an annual threshold to be able to perform the procedure.   In her article Boodman takes the example of a pancreatic cancer patient who suffered a botched Whipple surgery after an inexperience surgeon convinced him she could do it. The patient had to undergo another surgery where a surgeon specializing in Whipple surgery successfully treated him. Boodman also refers to several studies demonstrating that in cases of complex procedures patients undergoing surgery at hospitals with a high volume of these types of surgeries had a much lesser risk to die than those in hospitals performing a low volume of the same procedures. The author also discusses the difficulty for patients to find information about how many times the surgeon performed the risky procedure and what is his or her success rate is.

Read the complete article here

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Presbyterian The New York Presbyterian Hospital / Weill Cornell Medical Center recently settled a 2.2 million lawsuit with the Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) for allowing a TV crew to film two patients without their consent (see press release).

In 2011 Mark Chanko was hit by a garbage truck and rushed to the New York Presbyterian Emergency Room. He was critically injured and doctors were unable to save his life. A crew of “NY Med”, a reality show featuring DR Oz, was shooting in the Emergency Room when Mark Chanko arrived. The crew filmed nurses and doctors taking care of Mark Chanko as he was dying. The crew recorded footage of Chanko asking about his wife and also doctors comments about the dying patient. When the show was aired a year later on ABC the face of the patient was blurred and his voice was muffled.  Mark Chanko’s wife, Anita saw the show and recognized her husband despite the blur on his face and the changes in his voice. Anita Chanko was in  shock. She heard her husband ask the doctors “Does my wife know I’m here?’ and then she saw him dying before her eyes.

Intimate moments like this one as well as any disclosure about a patient’s health are supposed to be shared only with the patient and designated family members under a federal patient privacy law known as HIPPA which stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Under this law, media are not authorized access to patients health information without the patients consent. Anita or any other members of her family were never asked by the hospital or the TV crew if it was OK to film her husband (see previous article in the New York Times). Her son, Kenneth Chanko also filed a lawsuit against the hospital and ABC.

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Desmoid-type_fibromatosis.gross_pathology Although very rare, failure to diagnose and treat desmoids tumors, also called aggressive fibromatosis, a tumor that develops in the fibrous tissue that forms tendons and ligaments, can be medical malpractice. Desmoids tumors are very rare and difficult to diagnose and doctors are still debating what is the most appropriate categorization and treatment. In a recent article in the Washington Post, Sandra G. Boodman writes about a 24 year woman who suffered several episodes of excruciating stomach pain before being diagnosed and treated for a desmoid tumor.

Johanna Dickson was 23 years old when the first symptoms of the disease occured. She had just come back from South Africa when she suffered a first episode of acute abdominal pain. She thought she caught some type of stomach bug in her last trip. The family doctor sent her to the hospital for various tests but nothing was found and the pain disappeared.

Another crisis happened six months later but it went away quickly so she didn’t even bother to see a doctor.

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spinal cord injuryThe medical practice of trying to avoid scar formation at the site of a spinal cord injury may indeed not be correct. Every year approximately 12,500 American will suffer a spinal cord injury and an estimated 276,000 people in the US are suffering from long term effects related to this injury. For decades the prevailing medical dogma was that that scars were preventing neuronal regrowth across the injured area but a newly released study says it is actually the opposite that happens. Scar forming cells called astrocytes may actually help nerve regrowth.  A study recently published in Nature and authored by  Mark A. Anderson, Joshua E. Burda, Yilong Ren, Yan Ao, Timothy M. O’Shea, Riki Kawaguchi, Giovanni Coppola, Baljit S. Khakh, Timothy J. Deming & Michael V. Sofroniew found that   “scars may be a bridge and not a barrier towards developing better treatments for paralyzing spinal cord injuries.”

Read more in Medical News Today

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depressedA doctor who doesn’t screen a child treated for Cushing syndrome for depression related mental illness may commit medical malpractice.

Cushing syndrome is a rare disease that occurs when the body produces too much of the hormone cortisol. It can lead to obesity, infections, bone fractures and kidney stones. Therefore it shouldn’t be left untreated.  The disease can be caused by taking too much glucocorticosteroid medicine or by a pituitary gland tumor that releases Adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) among other causes. When a child suffers from this syndrome the usual treatment is to remove the tumor that produces the excess cortisol.

A study recently released by the National Institute of Health however shows that children that have been treated for this syndrome have a high risk of developing anxiety and suicidal thoughts months after they have been successfully treated. The study looked at 149 patients and found that 6% of them thought about suicide and experienced depression, irritability, anxiety and anger with outbursts of rage after the treatment. These symptoms appeared from 7 to 48 months after the treatment.

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renal mass

renal mass in a 3 year olds child

Failure to timely diagnose Denys-Drash syndrome can be medical malpractice that can lead to renal failure and ultimately death. Denys-Drash syndrom is a very rare congenital disorder that affects young children. There are only 150 known cases in the world therefore very little information is available for doctors to diagnose and treat this disorder.

What is known so far is that  90% of the children with this disorder develop a rare pediatric kidney cancer known as Wilms tumor. Undescended testes and severe proximal hypospadias are also associated with this disorder. The Journal of the American Academy of Physician Assistants (JAAPA) recently released an article describing the case of a 3 year old patient affected by this syndrome. The authors Shawn C. Smith,  Barry Chang and Laura Beth Fleming are all from the Cardon Children Medical Center in Mesa, AZ where the patient was admitted.  The article describe how the authors of the article diagnosed the disorder and which treatments were used to treat the patient. The complete article can be found here 

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Jeffrey BloomOur partner, New York Medical Malpractice Lawyer Jeffrey Bloom was quoted in an article about medical malpractice insurance in NY which appeared on Politico New York/Capital New York.com. The article focused on the influx into the New York medical malpractice insurance market of out of state insurers known as risk retention groups. While New York’s carriers are more expensive, they are safer than out of state insurers because they pay into a guaranty fund that acts as a safety net.  If one of them is in trouble and goes belly up, the costs are passed along to the other insurers of the State. Out of state companies also known as Risk Retention Groups (RRGs) do not pay into this guaranty fund. This is one of the reasons why they can offer cheaper rates to physicians than New York insurers.  RRGs are regulated by their home state and not by New York Sate. If a RRG goes under,  in some cases physicians maybe exposed and personally liable for malpractice claims. Because New York can’t regulate these funds it weakens the state’s safety net. Additionally the recent turmoil of Physicians’ Reciprocal Insurers, or PRI, the second largest carrier in the state, is further undermining the market.  Jeff pointed out that the New York  medical malpractice market is not only quite stable but obviously viewed as a potentially  quite profitable market by medical malpractice insurers nationwide.
In addition to trying and managing medical malpractice cases, Jeffrey Bloom is the Co-chair of the Medical Malpractice Committee of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association as well as the Co-Chair of LAWPAC New York, the Trial Lawyers political action committee. In these roles, he works to protect the rights of victims of medical malpractice in Albany with the Legislature and State government.
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Distribution of the maxillary and mandibular nerves, and the submaxillary ganglion. Source: Wikipedia

Facial nerves, Source: Wikipedia

Failure to diagnose a rare disease called trigeminal neuralgia (TN) can be medical malpractice. The disorder can cause pain so extreme to a patient that it has been nicknamed “the suicide disease”.

In a recent article in the Washington Post, Sandra G. Boodman describes the story of a 59 year old man who almost died after a cohort of doctors he visited were unable to make a proper diagnosis.

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brOur managing partner, New York Medical Malpractice Lawyer Ben Rubinowitz will be a panel member at the Medical Malpractice Litigation 2016 NYC Live & Webcast seminar organized by the NYSBA on April 15.   Ben will be speaking on effective methods of deposing the defendant doctor in a medical malpractice case.

This seminar is an excellent opportunity for young and experienced lawyers to keep up to date with recent issues in medical malpractice and to learn trial strategies and techniques from top litigators and distinguished judges. The Agenda includes:

  • Developments in the Substantive Law
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Medical malpractice is on the rise in hospices. Once a place handled by nuns and caring volunteers, hospice care has become a multi-million dollar business handled by not so caring CEO’s who are often putting profits ahead of patient needs.

Recently the FBI busted Brad Harris the 30 year old owner and CEO of a Texas Hospice for instructing nurses to overdose patients.  The Daily Beast  writes that during the course of the investigation Harris texted one of the nurses “You need to make this patient go bye-bye”. Harris who has no medical education also texted another nurse to increase by four times the patient’s medication. In another conversation Harris said “if only this F*** would die”.

Because hospices are paid by the government through Medicaid and Medicare  they receive a cap amount of $27,820.75  per patient. Therefore a patient who stays alive too long is not profitable for a hospice. The incentive is to have more patients with shorter stays. The FBI said Harris spoke about “finding patients who would die within 24hrs”.

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