Few Kansas City residents likely spend much time thinking about the possibility that they, or a loved one, will be the victim of an action that constitutes medical malpractice. Despite this, individuals throughout the state of Missouri are the recipients of negligent care at the hands of medical providers. Sometimes, the negligent care is obvious and injuries are suffered....
Read MoreThe Food and Drug Administration recently put out a warning that the drug Depakote, known generically as divalproex sodium, taken during pregnancy may cause brain damage that could lower the child’s IQ by as much as 11 points, on average. The drug, which is prescribed to treat seizures, bipolar disorder and chronic migraines, already carries a warning that it...
Read MoreWhat would you do if you were in the midst of delivering your child and you thought something was wrong? Ideally, you wouldn’t have to worry, because your doctors and nurses have you hooked up to a variety of machines that are keeping track of how you and your baby are doing. They have years of training; you just...
Read MoreA local man claims that a doctor, the founder of the clinic Health Centers of America in Kansas City, falsely diagnosed him with 18 different diseases, all before she bothered to examine him, take a medical history, run diagnostic tests, or indeed meet him at all. In addition to making false diagnoses ranging from insomnia to cortico-adrenal insufficiency, the...
Read MoreDiagnostic errors “are completely underrepresented in terms of what we pay attention to,” says the lead author of a new study just published in the medical journal BMJ Quality & Safety. If the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine researchers are right, failure to diagnose patient conditions accurately and in time may be the cause of as many as...
Read MoreWhen a New York medical malpractice lawyer turned down an $8 million settlement offer for a girl born with severe cerebral palsy due to birth injuries, everyone thought he was crazy. When took the case to trial and lost, it looked like they were right. That case was overturned on appeal, however, and had to be retried. The second...
Read MoreMissouri residents expect a certain standard of care from doctors and health professionals. Whether they are receiving treatment for a severe injury or something as simple as the common cold, patients expect that their ailment will be correctly diagnosed and they will receive the correct treatment in the end. But a recent story out of Washington reminds us that...
Read MoreA recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that remote, rural hospitals experienced higher death rates than others did in the study period, which was between 2002 and 2010. Because these are often considered “critical access” facilities for those who would otherwise be geographically too distant from a hospital to receive adequate emergency medical...
Read MoreRecently, a committee of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists reviewed the available research on the risks and benefits of cesarean-section births performed purely at the request of the mother. Overall, the group determined that more women experience fewer complications from vaginal birth, and the group recommended that doctors strongly encourage mothers to choose that option. The evidence...
Read MoreThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene have just announced that the recipient of an organ donation recently died of a rabies infection in the donor. The deceased was one of four people who received organs from the same donor, and the other three are now receiving rabies treatment. Unfortunately,...
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