Articles Posted in Experts

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Melvin Jones received a cervical laminectomy on Feb. 6, 2008 by surgeon Dr. Martin Luken. Dr. Charles Beck, an internist at the same hospital, evaluated Jones after the surgery. Jones developed gastrointestinal issues, and Dr. Beck ordered a series of tests. Dr. Beck remained involved with Jones’s care over the next several days.

Dr. Beck had a scheduled vacation, and so he turned over the gastrointestinal care to Dr. Shibban Ganju. Dr. Ganju ordered additional tests, but shortly afterwards, Jones’s colon perforated. Because of the colon perforation, Jones had his colon removed and had a permanent ileostomy tube installed. On Dec, 4, 2008, Jones and his wife filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against Drs. Beck and Ganju as well as the hospital in which he had received care.

In the lawsuit,. Jones alleged that the doctors chose not to properly treat and diagnose his condition. His wife, Loleather Jones, filed a claim for loss of consortium. Both the hospital and Dr. Ganju settled the case before trial and left Dr. Beck to defend at trial.

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Ms. Doe, 17, experienced back and abdominal pain in her 34th week of the pregnancy. She was admitted to a local hospital where her condition deteriorated over the next several days.

Ms. Doe was then diagnosed as having sepsis and placed on a ventilator. After giving birth to her daughter, Ms. Doe’s respiratory status worsened, prompting a Code Blue. Despite efforts to resuscitate, she suffered a hypoxic brain injury resulting in cognitive impairment. Ms. Doe now requires 24-hour care and lives in a nursing home facility.

The lawsuit against the hospital claimed that the hospital’s respiratory therapists chose not to properly adjust Ms. Doe’s ventilator settings. It was alleged that the settings or the lack of the proper settings was the cause of Ms. Doe’s brain injury. The lawsuit did not claim lost income.

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Karol Stawarz was complaining to his primary care physician, Dr. Victor Forys, about his lower abdominal pain. Dr. Forys diagnosed gastroenteritis and prescribed medicine. He also told Stawarz to follow up in 24 hours or go directly to the hospital if his condition got worse.

On the following day, Stawarz went to a hospital where he was diagnosed as having a perforated appendix. Stawarz required an emergency appendectomy and later developed a fistula, which necessitated a temporary colostomy.

Stawarz and his wife  sued Dr. Forys and his medical practice, claiming that Dr. Forys chose not to timely diagnose the appendicitis by ordering a stat CT scan and sending Stawarz directly to the hospital after that examination.

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A Will County, Ill., jury entered a $1,066,000 verdict against an orthopedic surgeon, David Burt, M.D.  Virginia Faletti, 82, underwent endoscopic carpal tunnel release surgery on her right wrist at Edward Hospital.  The surgery was done to relieve pressure on the median nerve because of crowding within the carpal tunnel of the wrist. 

Dr. Burt, however, cut the median nerve during the surgery.  After the procedure, Faletti felt pain and numbness in the right hand and wrist, but Dr. Burt chose not to recognize that he had cut the median nerve.  Instead, Dr. Burt prescribed medicine for the nerve pain as well as a brace and physical therapy, which did not resolve Faletti’s symptoms. 

Later, Faletti sought a second opinion and was eventually diagnosed with a transected median nerve by a neurosurgeon.  The neurosurgeon then referred her to a plastic reconstructive surgeon who performed nerve repair surgery. During this procedure, the doctor noted the right median nerve had been completely transected except for one nerve fiber. 

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Joyce Bonner was injured in a fall and lost four of her front teeth. She received treatment from dentist Dr. Elliott Ostro to repair the damage. Ostro recommended four implants to replace the teeth. However, Ostro did not take x-rays or make molds of Bonner’s mouth before starting his work.

More than a year later, Ostro still had not managed to complete the implant work. Bonner stopped seeing him and started with a new dentist in 2009. The new dentist gave his opinion that Ostro had not properly prepared Bonner for the implants and restoration of her teeth. Bonner later filed a lawsuit against Ostro.

At the trial, Bonner called dentist Dr. Loren Goldstein to testify as an expert witness as to the standard of care required for implant surgery. Goldstein testified that Ostro had deviated from the standard of care by failing to take x-rays or molds of Bonner’s mouth before starting surgery.

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Attorneys know that experts are frequently important in the courtroom to assist them during trial. A doctor, for example, can introduce expertise and experience that an attorney cannot possibly duplicate. The doctor’s testimony can influence the jury in exactly the way the attorney desires.

It is important, however, to make sure that the expert testimony is credible and supportive. This was proved in a recent case that came before the Maryland Court of Appeals in Dixon v. Ford Motor Co., et al., 2012 WL 2483315. In this case, the plaintiff brought a suit against certain automobile and brake manufacturers alleging that Joan Dixon’s household exposure to asbestos caused her to develop and die from pleural mesothelioma. The complaint alleged that Dixon was exposed to asbestos dust on her husband’s work clothes. He worked with asbestos-containing auto parts.

At trial, the plaintiff’s attorneys introduced Dr. Laura Welch. The attorneys identified her as an expert in asbestos epidemiology.

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There is an old saying that hindsight is always twenty-twenty, i.e., we can always see something coming after the fact. When it comes to medical cases, it is often easy to see the signs and symptoms of a disease after it has run its course. However, diagnosing a disease in its early stages is not always easy; medicine is not a perfect science and doctors can’t always diagnose the problem. Therefore, in order to prove that a doctor negligently failed to diagnose a disease, a patient needs to prove that the doctor should have been able to diagnose the problem, but chose not to.

In the Illinois medical malpractice lawsuit of Zachary Monahan v. Joseph Giordano, D.O., Edward Health Services d/b/a Edward Medical Group, Case No. 07 L 563 (Will County), the plaintiff alleged that his doctor chose not to diagnose his heart disease. However, the WIll County jury disagreed and found the doctor not guilty.

Zachary Monahan had presented to Dr. Giordano, his primary care physician, for several office visits between April and May 2001. During the course of those visits, Monahan continued to complain of a persistent fever, night sweats, and muscle aches. While Dr. Giordano conducted several tests during that time, it was not until Monahan’s final office visit on May 12, 2001 that Dr. Giordano chose to order a blood culture.

The blood culture results showed that Monahan had a blood-born infection. Due to the serious nature of these results Monahan was immediately notified and admitted to Edward Hospital to begin intravenous antibiotics. The cause of his infection was then diagnosed as bacterial endocarditis, an infection of the lining within the heart’s chambers.

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In medical malpractice lawsuits, there is sometimes a thin line between what constitutes negligence and what does not. Take for example the Cook County lawsuit of Jennifer Irwin v. Alan B. Loren, M.D. and Daniel R. Conway, M.D., Advanced Surgical Associates, S.C., 08 L 2760. The defendant doctors committed a surgical error while removing the plaintiff’s gallbladder; however, the jury found the doctors were not guilty of medical negligence.

The surgery at issue in Irwin took place at Northwest Community Hospital in March 2006. The 43 year-old plaintiff was scheduled to have her gallbladder removed in a laparoscopic cholecystectomy procedure performed by Dr. Alan Loren. Performing a surgery laparoscopically means that the surgeon relies on a camera to see inside the body’s internal structures. Doing so allows the surgeon to make a much smaller incision and drastically decrease recovery time. However, this also means that the surgeon is not directly looking at the relevant organs and needs to correctly interpret what is seen on the camera.

Unfortunately, in Ms. Irwin’s case, Dr. Loren did not correctly interpret the camera’s images, at least not at first. Dr. Loren initially misidentified Irwin’s common bile duct as the cystic duct. As a result of this misidentification, Dr. Loren incorrectly clamped the common bile duct with surgical clips and cut it. The common bile duct is responsible for carrying bile from the liver and gallbladder into the upper part of the small intestine and is an important component of the digestion process.

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The First District Appellate Court of Illinois affirmed a not guilty jury verdict in the medical malpractice lawsuit of Raven Taylor v. The County of Cook, et al., No. 1-09-3085. While the plaintiff appealed the verdict on several counts, perhaps the most significant of the appellate court’s rulings was in regards to the content of an expert’s testimony. While Taylor’s counsel argued that a medical expert could not testify regarding a medical treatment if he did not use it in his own practice, the appellate court found otherwise. It held that a medical expert could offer opinions about a medical treatment even if he used a different treatment in his own practice.

Taylor arose out of medical treatment Raven Taylor received at Cook County Hospital after experiencing migraines, joint stiffness and pain, and loss of her peripheral vision. While Taylor also received treatment for these various symptoms at Oak Forest Hospital, it was the treatment plan developed at Cook County Hospital that was the subject of the medical malpractice lawsuit. The Cook County Hospital staff suspected that Taylor’s symptoms were being caused by polymyositis, an inflammatory muscular disease that can eventually lead to muscular problems. While polymyositis generally worsens muscle function slowly, in some cases it can progress rapidly and even lead to permanent disabilities.

Taylor unfortunately had the quick acting form of polymyositis and was in fact left with permanent disabilities. Her attorney and medical experts contended that her poor outcome was due to the fact that the physicians at Cook County Hospital were not aggressive enough in diagnosing and treating Taylor’s severe case of polymyositis. However, the defendants’ medical experts testified that while the doctors could have employed alternate treatment plans, that their actions were still within the acceptable standard of care. It was this testimony that was the subject of the appellate court’s case review.

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The Illinois Appellate Court has found that a medical expert in a medical malpractice case may be impeached with the use of the physician’s §2-622 (Illinois Code of Civil Procedure) report as a prior inconsistent statement. This issue before the court was one of first impression in the state and was decided upon in Iaccino v. Anderson, No. 1-07-0207.
In the Iaccino birth injury lawsuit, the plaintiff’s attorneys alleged that the defendant doctors and hospital were responsible for the brain damage that the minor plaintiff, Jonathan Iaccino, suffered as a result of oxygen deprivation during his birth. The plaintiff’s attorneys alleged that the defendants’ medical negligent occurred as a result of their failure to monitor Jonathan’s fetal heart rate and their lack of response to the hyperstimulation of the uterus during his labor and delivery.

Gary Blake, M.D. provided a Illinois Code of Civil Procedure §2-622 affidavit as one of the plaintiff’s medical experts in Iaccino. When Dr. Blake signed the §2-622 report he stated that the decelerations recorded on a fetal-monitor strip were “variable decelerations.” However, at the trial, Dr. Blake testified that these strips showed “late decelerations” or “variable decelerations with a late component.”

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