Routine wisdom tooth surgery that ended in the death of a teenager in 2011 recently ended in a legal settlement of the case. The Baltimore Sun, reporting on the medical malpractice case recently, noted that 17-year-old Jennifer Michelle “Jenny” Olenick died after being deprived of oxygen during the procedure two years ago. The lack of oxygen […]

A wrong diagnosis resulted in the amputation of a woman’s foot, a jury in Spokane found in awarding $813,000 to the woman in a medical malpractice case. Darlene Turner claimed in a civil suit that her doctor failed to perform an appropriate physical when he diagnosed her as having terminal cancer. According to a news

Between 80,000 and 160,000 patients suffer preventable injury or death because of a medical misdiagnoses each year in the United States. That was the conclusion of an extensive study by researchers from Johns Hopkins Medical Center which found that mistakes made in diagnoses – including missed, wrong or delayed diagnoses – happened more often and with

A review recently found that the Wisconsin Medical Board failed to severely discipline doctors who committed egregious errors, many in which patients suffered serious injuries or even death. The report by the State Journal reviewed 218 cases that led to board discipline from 2010 to 2012 and found that in more than half the cases doctors received

The toddler was checked into a Chicago hospital in December 2011 for relatively routine surgery to repair an undescended testicle. But the child suffered cardiac arrest after the operation and it took five minutes for medical personnel to respond. It was too long and too late. The child suffered brain damage due to oxygen deprivation.

More and more these days medical procedures are being outsourced by hospitals, sometimes to countries halfway around the world. On March 18, 2008, Sharron Juno was discharged from an Alabama hospital with her discharge summary – unknown to her treating physician — outsourced by the hospital and ultimately transcribed in India. The transcript and various

A new study reports that each year in the United States doctors commit more than 4,000 “never events” — the kind of medical mistake that should never happen. These errors include operating on the wrong part of the body or performing the wrong procedure or even performing surgery on the wrong patient altogether. Another common

A jury in Syracuse awarded $1.5 million in the case of a teacher and beloved coach at an upstate New York high school who killed himself while under the effects of antidepressants. The state Supreme Court jury found that Joe Mazella had been overmedicated and that negligent medical treatment contributed to his suicide in 2009. The

When doctors at an Ohio hospital finished colon surgery on a woman, they failed to notice that something was missing from the operating room that was there before – a towel. It was nearly five months after her June 2009 surgery before the location of the towel was discovered. It was inside the patient, 43-year-old

After a rash of spine operations went bad, it was discovered that one of the doctors performing the procedure at a New Mexico hospital had allegedly faked his credentials — he wasn’t even a surgeon at all. That revelation and other problems resulted in the Gerald Champion Regional Medical Center agreeing to settle 80 malpractice

New York City has paid out more than a half billion dollars over the last four fiscal years  to pay for medical mistakes at its 11 public hospitals, according to a report in the New York Daily News citing city records. The tab – paid ultimately by taxpayers — came to $134 million in the last fiscal