Atlanta Injury Lawyers Blog

Published on: September 26, 2011

Calls for Action Against Mercury Dental Fillings Grow Louder

Atlanta dental malpractice lawyers have found the failure of the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) to warn the public adequately about the dangers of mercury dental fillings or amalgam fillings, perplexing. The calls for the agency to limit the use of mercury fillings, or warn the public about the risks of these fillings, are getting louder. While it is not clear whether these fillings are, in fact, causing the problems that some researchers and activists are attributing to them, I think the best course of action is to inform the public of what information and evidence is out there and let each person decide for themselves what course of action they want to take with the filling that they get.

This month, dentists, consumers and health care experts are calling on the agency to warn consumers about the risks of these fillings. Among the people adding their voices to these calls is a woman, who alleges that her children were severely harmed by the mercury fillings that were inserted into her teeth during her pregnancies.

It’s not as if scientists, environmental groups and health experts do not agree on the risks to human health from mercury exposure. There is an almost unanimous opinion that exposure to mercury damages human health and risks the environment. However, in spite of this evidence, the Food and Drug Administration has been painfully slow to act on the matter.
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Published on: September 25, 2011

Georgia Hospitals Are Breeding Grounds for Infection-Causing Bacteria

by Robert J. Fleming

It’s not the most comforting thought for a patient who is scheduled for a hospital visit. A couple of recent studies indicate that seemingly innocuous items in a hospital, like doctors’ and nurses’ clothing or hospital curtains may be teeming with deadly infection-causing bacteria.

It’s not as if Atlanta medical malpractice lawyers are not aware that surfaces can be contaminated in hospitals. However, you don’t expect your doctor’s or a nurses’ uniforms to be covered with MRSA. Yet a study conducted by researchers in Jerusalem found exactly that. They swabbed these uniforms, and analyzed the samples. They found potentially dangerous infection-causing pathogens on more than 60% of the clothing that they tested. Nurses’ uniforms were found to be much more dangerous, with 65% of the uniforms testing positive for pathogens, compared to 60% of doctors’ scrubs.

The researchers are quick to point out that there may be no need to worry, because there is minimal chance of infection from doctors’ or nurses’ clothing. However, considering the unchecked spread of hospital-acquired infections in the country, hospitals need to be setting stricter standards about staff changing uniforms every day, because this seems to reduce the growth of pathogens.
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Published on: September 23, 2011

Actos Bladder Cancer Link

by Robert J. Fleming

There has been a number of reported cases of bladder cancer caused by the diabetes drug, Actos. According to a major health-related website, there have been over 22,000 reported incidents of side affects from patients who have taken Actos and 0.22% of these have reported bladder cancer.

The longer someone has taken the drug, the more likely they are to contract bladder cancer. If you have been diagnosed with bladder cancer and suspect it may be related to an Actos prescription, seek medical help immediately. Bladder cancer is an extremely aggressive form of cancer.

In June of 2011, France and Germany banned the sale of Actos because of links to cancer. Recently, the FDA has announced that it was reviewing the link between Actos and bladder cancer.
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Published on: September 22, 2011

Ex-Marine Awarded $17.5 Million after Botched Dental Surgery

by Robert J. Fleming

An ex-Marine, who was left severely injured after suffering a stroke that resulted from a botched dental surgery, has reportedly been awarded $17.5 million in damages caused by the alleged negligence.

The Marine, Christopher Ellison, had visited a Veterans Administration Medical Center for dental surgery in 2007. He needed to have at least eight teeth removed. While he was undergoing surgery for the removal of the teeth, his blood pressure began plummeting. However, the dentist did not stop the surgery as he should have.

After the surgery, when Ellison was driving back home, he suffered a stroke. He was driving alone, and was not in any position to rush to the hospital for emergency treatment. As a result of the dental malpractice, he suffered severe brain damage, and now needs twenty-four hour care.

Last week, a federal judge awarded him $17.5 million. According to Assistant U.S. Atty. Thomas Johnson, the verdict will be appealed.
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Published on: September 17, 2011

Woman Claims Dental Malpractice Compensation after Wrong Extraction

by Robert J. Fleming

Most of the dental malpractice claims that I come across as an Atlanta dental malpractice attorney involve lingual nerve injuries or alveolar nerve injuries caused during dental procedures. However, there’s more than one way that a dentist can be reckless.

A woman in Somerset UK is suing her dentist for malpractice, after he extracted the wrong tooth. The story doesn’t end there. The dentist, who had discarded the extracted tooth into the garbage, then retrieved the tooth, and replanted it right back on to the patient.

According to the 44-year-old patient, her dentist erroneously extracted a perfectly healthy tooth instead of the rotting teeth. She realized it when she went home, and contacted the dentist. He called her back to his dental office for remedial measures, and proceeded to replant the extracted tooth. By this time, he had already discarded the healthy, extracted tooth into the waste-bin. Her tooth was retrieved from a waste-basket that had a lot of medical waste, including bloodied tissues, used needles and saliva wipes.

According to the toothpaste manufacturer, Colgate’s, web site:

When a tooth has been knocked out, the nerves, blood vessels and supporting tissues are damaged, too. The nerves and blood vessels can’t be repaired. That is why all avulsed teeth will need a root canal. However, the bone can reattach to the root of the tooth once it’s put back into place.

The odds of saving a tooth are highest in young children, but adult teeth can be saved as well. Only permanent teeth should be re-implanted.

It is important to get to the dentist as quickly as possible after a tooth has been knocked out. It is also important to avoid damaging the tooth even more.

Follow these suggestions to improve the chances of saving your tooth:

Handle the tooth carefully. Try not to touch the root (the part of the tooth that was under the gum). It can be damaged easily.
If the tooth is dirty, hold it by the upper part (the crown) and rinse it with milk. If you don’t have any milk, rinse it with water. Don’t wipe it off with a wash cloth, shirt or other fabric. This could damage the tooth.
Keep the tooth moist. Drop it into a glass of milk. If you can’t do this, place the tooth in your mouth, between the cheek and gum. A young child may not be able to safely “store” the tooth in his or her mouth without swallowing it. Instead, have the child spit into a cup. Place the tooth in the cup with the saliva. If nothing else is available, place the tooth in a cup of water. The most important thing is to keep the tooth moist.

Published on: August 30, 2011

Parent Launches Facebook Attack against Dentist

by Robert J. Fleming

It would have been much more effective to get in touch with an Atlanta dental malpractice lawyer, but the parent of a five-year-old child had other ideas. The father, created a Facebook page deriding his son’s dentist after a nightmarish treatment procedure, during which, he alleges, the dentist extracted a tooth without the proper use of anesthesia.

According to the Facebook page, the episode occurred last month at the clinic of a prominent dentist in the area. The Facebook poster/Dad alleges that the dentist didn’t wait for the child to be properly sedated before extracting the tooth. The child had a traumatic experience. He allegedly had to be held down by assistants, and vomited and urinated during the procedure, screaming the entire time.

What the father did next, which is what a lot of people these days do: vent on Facebook by creating a page and trashing the dentist. He immediately created a Facebook page called “I Hate Dr. ________ of ____________,” which quickly accumulated more than 400 members. Many of the members are concerned parents, who have used the Facebook post to vent about their own experiences with the concerned dentist.

According to some of the Facebook posts, the dentist has often mistreated child patients. Some of them spoke of him slapping and strapping children down to restrain them, and others spoke of a dentist who couldn’t be bothered to wait until a child was properly sedated before beginning a procedure.
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Published on: August 30, 2011

Citizenship and Immigration Status Often Not Admissible in Georgia Trials

by Robert J. Fleming

With the recent changes in immigration law, many immigrants in Georgia are shying away from utilizing the court system for fear of being deported. This is unfortunate and unwarranted because Georgia law is clear: evidence concerning a party’s immigration status is irrelevant to the issues of negligence and damages in a lawsuit. This type of evidence is highly prejudicial and has no probative force as to the issues involved. E.g., Evans v. State 433 S.E.2d 426 (Ga. App. 1993).

The admission of this evidence at trial would improperly influence the jury and result in a jury decision based on bias and prejudice, rather than on the relevant facts of the case.

In Georgia state court, admissibility of this type of evidence is governed by O.C.G.A. § 24-2-1. Evidence that is irrelevant to the issues at trial is NOT admissible. Evidence is relevant if it has a logical relationship to the fact to be established. In a typical personal injury lawsuit, the citizenship and immigration status of the plaintiff simply have no relevance to the issues at hand (typically liability and damages) and are only sought to be introduced by the Defendant to bias the jury.

In federal court, references to citizenship and immigration status are governed by Federal Rule of Evidence 402, which excludes all evidence that is not relevant. Relevant evidence is evidence having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence. FRE 401.

Evidence related to a Plaintiff’s citizenship or immigration status is irrelevant and should be excluded by the trial judge in both federal and state courts in Georgia.

Not only are the issues of citizenship and immigration status inadmissible in Georgia trials, a recent federal court decision has held that this information is not discoverable during pre-trial discovery. Rodriguez v. Niagara Cleaning, No. 09-CV-22645, 2010 WL 2573974, at *3 (S.D. Fla. June 24, 2010). In the Rodriguez case, the Defendant attempted to discover pretrial information on the Plaintiff’s citizenship and immigration status. In denying Defendant’s motion to compel Plaintiff to produce this information, the Rodriguez court correctly noted “courts that have examined this issue have nearly unanimously found that defendants typically are not entitled to information related to the immigration status of plaintiffs.”
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Published on: August 26, 2011

Atlanta Patients Don’t Have Access to Essential Safety Information

by Robert J. Fleming

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the “CDC”), about one in twenty patients who are hospitalized for treatment, will contract a hospital-acquired infection such as MRSA. In spite of those scary statistics, patients in Georgia still do not have access to the kind of information they need to make a safe choice while choosing a hospital.

Georgia’s laws do not require hospitals to share information about infections in their facilities. Hospitals are only required to notify Georgia’s public health officials about an outbreak of an infectious disease like tuberculosis, but are not required to report infections that occur in patients who have been admitted into the hospital for treatment.

Atlanta medical malpractice lawyers hope that will soon change. The Georgia Department of Public Health has kicked off a program aimed at preventing the kind of hospital-acquired infections that occur in Georgia’s hospitals daily. The hope is that at some point, the system will also allow a statistical record of infections. However, all that is in the future, and currently, patients in Georgia have no way of ascertaining the safety of the hospital they are considering. This is a shame, because we are seeing a large rise in the number of potential clients who have contracted MRSA and other infections due to hospital stays and the resulting negligence of the hospital.
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Published on: August 22, 2011

Atlanta Medical Malpractice Attorney Discusses Recent Study

by Robert J. Fleming

A study recently published by the New England Journal of Medicine found that 1 in 5 medical malpractice claims results in recoveries. Some of the findings of this study are not surprising, such as: 1 in about 15 doctors are sued each year; that lawsuits on behalf of victims who are children result in higher recoveries; and that specialists are sued more often than general practitioners. On the one hand, these statistics do appear to be more favorable to the plaintiffs than other studies that were conducted prior to this study.

As a medical malpractice lawyer in Georgia, the study puzzles me because it fails to point out that only a fraction of the victims of medical malpractice file lawsuits or make a claim on the doctor’s insurance company. The reason for this is simple: the cost to pursue a medical malpractice claim (i.e., expert witness fees and trial preparation fees) is so high that only the cases with the most egregious facts that result in catastrophic injuries can be brought by attorneys.

While these statistics may be accurate, it should be noted that most medical malpractice cases with merit are resolved favorably–if in the hands of a competent lawyer. These types of studies should not dissuade those who have been seriously injured in Georgia due to medical negligence from having their case reviewed by a competent lawyer who specializes in medical malpractice.

Injured victims of medical malpractice should also be aware of the potential difficulties of finding a competent lawyer to take their case if the injuries from the malpractice are not catastrophic.

It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of patients a year suffer some type of preventable injury or die while undergoing medical care. For many of these patients or surviving family, a lawsuit is the only hope to recover losses, learn the truth about what happened, and ensure the problem is corrected.

A 2013 Emory University School of Law study found that 95 percent of patients who seek an attorney for harm suffered during medical treatment will be shut out of the legal system, primarily for economic reasons. Most attorneys would not accept a case—even one they might win—if the damages likely were less than $250,000. Due to the high “cost of entry” in the form of expert review fees, and other expenses that must be incurred to investigate every medical malpractice case, this is not surprising.

More than 450 attorneys were surveyed for the Emory study, “Uncovering the Silent Victims of the American Medical Liability System,” which found that three out of four medical malpractice attorneys reject more than 90 percent of the cases they screen.

The reason: Lawyers may have to invest $50,000 or much more in order to pursue a case, and they usually only get paid if they win or settle. The payout is determined largely by economic damages—lost earnings, medical bills, and future costs caused by the injury. Those who don’t earn big paychecks—including children, the elderly, and stay-at-home-moms—are the least likely to find an attorney, studies show. The inability to find a lawyer is a common refrain.

Published on: August 20, 2011

Malpractice Lawsuit Claims Dentist Watched Soap Opera During Treatment

by Robert J. Fleming

A woman in Cook County, Illinois has filed a lawsuit against her dentist, claiming that he severely injured her lip during a procedure. That fact by itself would not have intrigued any Atlanta dental malpractice lawyer. However, according to the lawsuit, the dentist had been watching TV while he was performing the procedure. I have been a patient and a patient advocate for many clients who have been injured by dental malpractice. Some of the injuries resulting from dental malpractice that I have worked on include broken jaws, dental nerve damage, sinus perforations, blindness, and many other injuries and conditions caused by dental malpractice. It is hard to see, from my perspective, how a dental malpractice lawsuit can be justified for a bloody lip. However, I do not know all the facts and do not even begin to try to make the determination of whether that case has merit. I do know the great pains and the amount of expense involved in having a dental malpractice reviewed by an expert and filing the lawsuit–and it is quite substantial.

According to the woman, the incident occurred on July 30, 2009, when she visited the dentist for a procedure. While the dentist was performing the procedure, he and a dental assistant watched a soap opera on a television set in the room. While he was distracted, the dental instrument burned a hole in her lip.

The hole quickly began to bleed. There was severe bruising, and the wound began to ooze liquid. When the effects of the dental anesthesia wore off, the plaintiff also began to suffer excruciating pain. When she informed the dentist about her pain, he simply prescribed an oral treatment to treat mouth sores.
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