Articles Posted in Misdiagnosis

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Often surgery is seen as a last resort in medical treatment; doctors usually turn to performing an operation only if no other option exists. This is because surgery itself is not only risky, but can also lead to a wide range of additional complications. Doctors often opt for the least invasive surgery possible in an attempt to minimize the risk of complications. However, the McHenry County surgical malpractice lawsuit of Douglas Andrews v. Marshall E. Pederson, M.D., et al., 05 LA 180, claimed that the defendant surgeon instead performed a more invasive surgery than was necessary.

The Illinois medical malpractice lawsuit was brought by the 59-year-old plaintiff against his surgeon and his medical group, Dr. Marshall Pedersen and Fox Valley Neurosurgery, Ltd., respectively. The plaintiff, Douglas Andrews, a former Illinois State Police trooper, claimed that Dr. Pedersen performed an unnecessary spinal surgery that resulted in additional back problems.

Mr. Andrews, had originally presented to Dr. Pedersen with a herniated disc that was radiating pain down his leg. Dr. Pedersen recommended that Andrews undergo an extensive spinal fusion surgery, which he then performed on Andrews. However, this type of surgery is often done as a last resort for persistent back pain. A spinal fusion involves permanently fusing together vertebrae, which not only limits a patient’s mobility, but can also lead to additional back pain because of the increased pressure put on the other areas of the spine.

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A Cook County jury has found in favor of internist Dr. Sanjeev Joshi in a claim for an undiagnosed pulmonary embolism resulting in the death of K.R. K.R. presented to her internist, Dr. Joshi, at his Suburban Heights Medical Center office in Chicago Heights, Ill., on March 3, 2003. Her principal complaints consisted of an extended period of shortness of breath, dizziness and vaginal bleeding.

Dr. Joshi ordered a blood draw in his office, which revealed a severely low hemoglobin level at 7.6. Because of the blood level, K.R. was admitted to St. James Hospital in Chicago Heights for testing, observation and blood transfusions. During the 23-hour hospitalization, K.R. was evaluated by an obstetrician/gynecologist who ordered Depo-Provera in an attempt to stop her vaginal bleeding.

K.R.’s condition improved after receiving blood transfusions, but she died of a massive saddle pulmonary embolism four days later.

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In a Cook County medical malpractice lawsuit, a patient’s surviving family members filed a medical negligence lawsuit claiming that the doctor had misdiagnosed the patient’s disease and elected not to properly treat it. However, a jury found in favor of the defendant doctor after determining that the doctor’s actions did not directly cause the patient’s death in The Estate of D.W., deceased, et al. v. Dr. Lee, Midwest Surgery, S.C., 11 L 79.

The decedent first met the defendant doctor after being admitted to Sherman Hospital with complaints of chest and abdominal pain in April 2003. Dr. Lee, a general surgeon, was brought in on consult after a CT scan did not return any clear or obvious cause for the patient’s pain; the CT scan only showed the presence of free air.
After reviewing the patient’s medical history, the doctors concluded that the pain was likely caused by a perforated duodenal ulcer located near the patient’s small intestine. Dr. Lee performed an emergency surgery to repair the perforated ulcer. A little over three weeks later, the patient was discharged from Sherman Hospital with orders to follow up with Dr. Lee in four days.

Everything seemed to be going well, until December 2003 when the patient returned to Sherman Hospital, this time with a diagnosis of cholecystitis and cholelithiasis, i.e. a bladder infection and gallstones. Once again, Dr. Lee was called as a consultant and ended up performing the surgery to remove the patient’s gallbladder. He was then discharged just four days after presenting to the hospital and was again instructed to follow up with Dr. Lee.

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A Cook County jury returned a $5.1 million verdict in a wrongful death lawsuit filed against a city and its paramedics. The case had initially been dismissed on the basis that the city was immune from such claims. However, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed that ruling and held that the city and its paramedics could be tried under the Illinois Emergency Medical Services Act.

The Illinois wrongful death lawsuit involved a 16 year-old Park Ridge teen whose parents had called 911 after he was found unconscious during the early morning hours. However, by the time the paramedics arrived, the teen was conscious and breathing. While there was later some debate as to whether or not the family denied the need for further services at that time, the end result was that the paramedics left without doing a full assessment of the teen’s condition. Several hours later, his condition further deteriorated and another 911 call was made. However, this time the paramedics did not arrive in time and the teen ended up dying of a drug overdose.

As a result of the teen’s death, the family filed a lawsuit against the City of Park Ridge in which it alleged that its paramedics acted willfully and wantonly by choosing to not correctly assess the extent of the teen’s medical condition. The family maintained that at the time of the first 911 call that the teen should have been transported to a nearby hospital for further treatment.

The courts dismissed the claim after finding that the City of Park Ridge was immune under the Illinois Tort Immunity Act. The Immunity Act bars any liability against a local public entity for failure to evaluate, diagnose or prescribe treatment for an illness or physical condition. Therefore, the City of Park Ridge could not be held responsible for any of its employee’s failure to properly diagnose and treat patients.
The teen’s family appealed this decision to the Illinois Appellate Court, where it was affirmed. However, when it arrived before the Illinois Supreme Court, the decision was reversed on the finding that the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Act was the controlling law and not the Tort Immunity Act. The case was then remanded to the trial court for further handling.

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Cancer misdiagnosis lawsuits make up a fair share of medical malpractice lawsuits. However, most of those misdiagnosis lawsuits deal with a delay in diagnosis that results in a fatal outcome for the plaintiff. Whereas in Pamela Chouinard v. Dr. Janis Atkinson, North Shore Pathology Consultants S.C., 08 L 9295, the misdiagnosis claim centered on a false positive cancer diagnosis which led to an unnecessary surgery.

The Illinois medical malpractice lawsuit was brought by Pamela Chouinard following the removal of her thyroid gland. While Chouinard had initially been told the surgery was necessary because she had thyroid cancer, a biopsy taken after the surgery showed her thyroid to be benign and cancer free. Chouinard then sued Dr. Atkinson for misdiagnosing her alleged cancer and causing her to undergo thyroid surgery.

The case begins in July 2006 when 62 year-old Chouinard is found to have an enlarged thyroid gland. In order to determine the cause, she underwent a fine needle aspiration of her thyroid. The results showed multiple nodules on Chouinard’s thyroid, including a cold nodule, which is a common sign of thyroid cancer. Based on the thyroid aspiration results, the reviewing pathologist, Dr. Atkinson, entered a positive finding of malignant cancer of the papillary thyroid.

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A Chicago jury examined the question of what duty of care does a surgeon owe his patients following a surgery in the medical malpractice lawsuit of Marvin Rieker v. Libby Kristal, M.D., 08 L 90 (LaSalle County). For example, is the surgeon required to keep an eye on his patient’s care only when he/she is in the hospital, or is he required to be the follow up person for any questions related to the surgery even after the patient has gone home?

The case in question involved a cataract eye surgery that ophthalmologist Dr. Libby Kristal performed on Marvin Rieker. Almost from the start, the 79 year-old Rieker began to experience problems. Following the cataract surgery, Rieker began to complain of pain and redness in his eye. Dr. Kristal attributed Rieker’s complaints to the regular side effects of cataract surgery and told Rieker that his eye would take some time to heal.

However, the following day Rieker was still complaining of severe pain and redness that had not subsided. And while Dr. Kristal was out of town, she referred Rieker to an optometrist for evaluation. That optometrist recommended that Rieker be referred to a retinal surgeon within a few days and reported his findings to Dr. Kristal. Dr. Kristal authorized an increase in Rieker’s medications and assured Rieker that she would call him the next morning to follow up.

However, Dr. Kristal did not actually call Rieker until mid-afternoon and did not even see him until several hours after that. By then it was too late for Rieker; he had permanently lost his vision in the operated eye. In addition, the extent of damage required that he later have his entire eye removed and replaced with a prosthetic eye. Rieker filed a medical malpractice focusing on Dr. Kristal’s alleged surgical error.

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A Cook County judge denied a defendant’s motion for a change of venue in an Illinois wrongful death case despite the fact that several defendants and witnesses did not live in Cook County. And even though the trial judge did deny the venue change, he expressed his discomfort with the lack of clear guidelines when deciding venue. Despite this apparent confusion, the appellate court affirmed his decision in Susan Isom v. Riverside Medical Center, et al., No. 1-11-0426.

The case at issue in Isom dealt with a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Susan Isom on behalf of her late son, Tyrone Brooks. According to Isom’s Cook County lawsuit, Brooks’s death was due to the failure of the defendant doctors and clinics to diagnose Brooks’s sickle cell anemia. The alleged medical malpractice or the validity of the estate’s wrongful death claims were not the issue of the appellate court’s appeal; the court was simply examining whether Cook County was the correct venue for the claim.

The appellate court noted that the determination regarding a case’s venue is at the discretion of the trial court, which must consider both public and private interest factors when deciding the issue of venue. The court noted that the relevant private factors include the venue’s convenience to the parties, the ease of access to sources of evidence in that venue, and any other practical problems. Public factors would then include the interest in deciding controversies locally, the burden of imposing expenses on forums with little connections to the controversy, and docket congestion.

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A Chicago man sustained a worse medical injury as a result of a radiologist’s error. And while the resulting medical malpractice case settled, the plaintiff brought an additional institutional negligence lawsuit against the hospital. The second lawsuit, Oscar Salinas v. Advocate Health and Hospital Corp., 09 L 3233, went to trial, where the jury entered an $150,000 verdict against the defendant.

Both lawsuits arose as a result of a visit the plaintiff, Oscar Salinas, made to Dr. Jose Ramillo, a radiologist at Advocate Christ Hospital. Salinas was a 40 year-old forklift operator and had injured his knee at work. After taking an x-ray of Salinas’s knee, Dr. Ramillo diagnosed Salinas’s injury as water on his knee, i.e. a fluid build up around the knee joint, and discharged him.

However, a few days later Dr. Ramillo reviewed Salinas’s x-rays at the request of another physician at Advocate Christ Hospital. Upon second review, Dr. Ramillo revised his original diagnosis and entered a revised report stating that Salinas had a hairline fracture. However, neither Salinas or his physical therapist were never informed of this change in diagnosis and subsequently did not modify his treatment; Salinas continued to apply weight-bearing pressure to his injured leg.

After Salinas completed his physical therapy treatment, he underwent an MRI to determine why he was still having knee pain. The MRI revealed that the previously hairline fracture had expanded to a 2 cm. fracture. So instead of being a minor, easily treatable injury, Salinas had to undergo an open reduction internal fixation (ORIF) surgery and additional physical therapy. As a result, he lost additional time from work, which amounted to $10,000 in lost wages.

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A Will County jury found in favor of a Wilmington, Illinois nursing home in a wrongful death lawsuit in which the decedent’s family claimed the nursing home failed to provide adequate care. The not guilty verdict in Martin Donegan v. Embassy Care Center, 05 L 782 (Will County), came despite evidence that the nursing home had failed to perform a neurological exam following the resident’s fall.

The Illinois nursing home malpractice suit involved 53 year-old Martin Donegan. Donegan was a resident at Embassy Care Center due to his paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis. In July 2005, the nursing staff found Donegan out of his bed and in another patient’s room. While in that patient’s room, Donegan had fallen and hit his head.

While the typical procedure following any sort of fall is to perform a neurological assessment, which could include assessing a patient’s reflexes, gait, and general behavior, the nursing staff failed to do so. Instead, Donegan was simply returned to his own bed and a phone message was left for his treating physician. The treating physician failed to return that call and no further steps were taken following Donegan’s fall.

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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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