Advertising Category Archives — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

December 27, 2022

Patients may need to take steps to optimize time with harried doctors

In recent times, one of the issues most complained about by patients comes down to this: Why does my doctor zip through my office visit and fail to give me the attention I need and deserve?

To be sure, doctors these days struggle ever more with “efficiency” pushes in medicine by profit-obsessed business interests and private investors, combined with administrative demands — especially those tied to electronic health records.

These and other factors devour doctors’ frontline practice time. High-level policy makers, politicians, and regulators eventually may be forced to grapple with the rightful concern by regular folks that, as patients, they now confront the reality that a primary care doctor will spend on average 18 minutes with them in an office visit.

December 22, 2022

High court lets stand California ban on flavored tobacco products

by Patrick A. Malone

Californians have accomplished something that federal regulators have failed to — despite long, difficult campaigning. Voters in the biggest state in the nation not only have banned Big Tobacco from peddling its flavored products that target and exploit communities of color and the young. They also have defeated the industry in its legal challenges.

Big Tobacco had launched urgent appeals of the November ballot initiative banning flavored tobacco products only to see the U.S. Supreme Court decline to consider its case, the New York Times reported:

“As is the [high] court’s practice when it rules on emergency applications, its brief order gave no reasons. There were no noted dissents. R.J. Reynolds, the maker of Newport menthol cigarettes, had asked the justices to intervene before [Dec. 21], when the law is set to go into effect. The company, joined by several smaller ones, argued that a federal law, the Tobacco Control Act of 2009, allows states to regulate tobacco products but prohibits banning them … State officials responded that the federal law was meant to preserve the longstanding power of state and local authorities to regulate tobacco products and to ban their sale. Before and after the enactment of the federal law, they wrote, state and local authorities have taken action against flavored tobacco and e-cigarettes.”

December 20, 2022

In hospitals’ struggles with staffing crises, lessons on reaping and sowing

by Patrick A. Malone

Big hospitals and hospital chains have wailed, with considerable justification, since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic about financial damages they have suffered due to costly shortages of desperately needed health staff. But the institutions fostered this staffing crisis, with profit-ravenous suits in executive suites boosting hospital bottom lines in flusher times by slashing one of the biggest expenses in the business — frontline health care workers.

To see this up close, let’s zoom in on the experiences of Ascension, one of the nation’s largest chains, to see how hospitals plunged themselves into an economic and medical care mire, the New York Times reported:

“Ascension …spent years reducing its staffing levels in an effort to improve profitability, even though the chain is a nonprofit organization with nearly $18 billion of cash reserves. Since the start of the pandemic, nurses have been leaving hospitals in droves. The exodus stems from many factors, with the hospital industry blaming Covid, staff burnout, and tight labor markets for acute shortages of staff. But a New York Times investigation has found that hospitals helped lay the groundwork for the labor crisis long before the arrival of the coronavirus. Looking to bolster their bottom lines, hospitals sought to wring more work out of fewer employees. When the pandemic swamped hospitals with critically ill patients, their lean staffing went from a financial strength to a glaring weakness.

December 16, 2022

A holiday health warning to take to heart about drinking

by Patrick A. Malone

Cardiologists and other doctors have words to the wise for the aging, party-hearty-for-the-holidays crowd: Excessive boozing, as part of their seasonal merry making, puts those who partake of too much liquid cheer at heightened risk of heart problems.

The last thing, too, that public safety advocates would want to see in times when the nation is battling a rising road toll is any more intoxicated motorists.

Experts have become sufficiently savvy about the health damage caused heavy seasonal drinking that they developed a name for the harmful condition: holiday heart syndrome, the New York Times reported:

December 11, 2022

Big investors aid struggling vaping pioneer in $1.7 billion settlement

by Patrick A. Malone

While regular folks will count their pennies and fret about affording gifts for loved ones during an inflation-plagued holiday season, plutocrats have given the hoi polloi a rare glimpse of the major loot they see in the business of peddling health-wrecking e-cigarettes and vaping.

The concerning disclosures are emerging as part of the financial struggles for the industry pioneer Juul to stave off fierce federal regulation, angry customers, and plummeting business to survive.

In its latest step, Juul — the high-tech company that helped to create the e-cigarette and vaping fad and then saw its fortunes plunge with increasingly stern federal oversight of its products —has settled more than 5,000 lawsuits with 10,000-plus individual plaintiffs.

December 9, 2022

While surgeons operate often on the elderly, studies are just starting to detail the risks

by Patrick A. Malone

Seniors and their loved ones should take note of new and increasing data that researchers are developing about the risks undertaken by elderly patients who choose to undergo significant surgeries — procedures that make up a little less than half of costly operations performed in this country.

The numbers about invasive medical work can be mind-changing, especially for those with age-associated conditions, the independent, nonpartisan Kaiser Health News Service reported. As KHN’s “navigating aging” columnist Judith Graham wrote:

“Nearly 1 in 7 older adults die within a year of undergoing major surgery, according to an important new study that sheds much-needed light on the risks seniors face when having invasive procedures. Especially vulnerable are older patients with probable dementia (33% die within a year) and frailty (28%), as well as those having emergency surgeries (22%). Advanced age also amplifies risk: Patients who were 90 or older were six times as likely to die than those ages 65 to 69. The study in JAMA Surgery, published by researchers at Yale School of Medicine, addresses a notable gap in research: Though patients 65 and older undergo nearly 40% of all surgeries in the U.S., detailed national data about the outcomes of these procedures has been largely missing.”

December 7, 2022

In nursing homes and hospices, too little oversight, too much profiteering

by Patrick A. Malone

What happens when the highly vulnerable — older, sick, injured, and debilitated people — get left in the hands of profit-obsessed private enterprises operating under woefully lax regulatory oversight? Big messes abound, as news organizations have reported after taking deep dives into the workings of the “hustle” of for-profit hospice programs, or the chronic staffing shortages that prevail at far too many private nursing homes.

Sure, this is a hectic time of the year, and it can be a challenge to carve out the time to pore over the painstaking reporting of fine journalists who race to make public their major investigations before the year’s end (including to qualify for major professional prizes).

Still, for anyone concerned about destructive failures in the U.S. health care system, how they blow up over time, and how they get ignored until they become crises, the reports by ProPublica, the New Yorker, and USA Today are important reading.

December 6, 2022

Botched. Belabored. Enough already. Fix the FDA and Philips recall

by Patrick A. Malone

While critics long have ripped the Food and Drug Administration for its weak oversight of medical devices and its too cozy relationships with their makers, the federal agency and a Dutch global conglomerate have given millions of U.S. consumers a big, infuriating, prolonged exposure to just how bungled the oversight of this industry can be.

As 2022 races to its close, the Wall Street Journal has reported on this costly, inconvenient, and unacceptable mess, as has the New York Times. And now, so has Stat, the science and medical news site, which wrote this about the “flaws in device oversight” as so many regular folks have experienced with the FDA, manufacturer Philips, and CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) and BPAP or BiPAP (bilevel positive airway pressure) devices:

“The ongoing recall of millions of breathing devices made by Philips has been botched and belabored at nearly every turn: It took more than a decade after users first reported the soundproofing foam in their CPAP and BPAP machines breaking down for Philips to issue a recall. Even after the recall notice was issued, it failed to reach many patients, and many are still waiting on their promised replacement devices or refunds, some of which had to be recalled themselves. More than a year after the recall, the FDA has received more than 90,000 reports about problems with the devices, including 260 … deaths reportedly associated with the products. The [FDA] has pulled out all the stops — including regulatory orders not deployed in decades — to force Philips to contact users about the recall and replace the devices in a timely manner.

December 2, 2022

Keep this holiday season merry, bright — and as safe as possible

by Patrick A. Malone

For consumers who were too stuffed from their Thanksgiving feasting or too weary of stressful bargain hunting to jam the malls or to flock to the internet for Black Friday deals, the words to the wise have started flowing on how the savvy will ensure their holiday gifts also keep loved ones safe from unintended harms.

Kids toys, of course, are always cause for caution at this time of year, federal regulators say. But grownups also can glean safety reminders from disconcerting reports about an increasingly popular and practical potential seasonal acquisition — the so-called “e-bikes.”

With toys, the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued a timely and distressing study. The federal watchdog agency reported that in 2021:

November 30, 2022

As STD epidemic rages, the sexually active scorn a familiar protection

by Patrick A. Malone

In some not-so-great news for the nation’s sexual well-being, the rubber has hit the road for too many guys.

The familiar and oft-ridiculed prophylactic could play a significant role in battling an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) that has engulfed the nation, the Washington Post reported. But condom use has declined significantly, for example, as a leading means for family planning, falling in opinion surveys from 75% in 2011 to 42% among men polled.

Public health experts confront multiple challenges in trying to slash the soaring tide of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis, partly because medical advances with HIV-AIDS mistakenly have the sexually active, especially young men, believing that they can forgo condoms and be safe, the newspaper reported: