Back/Spine Surgery Category Archives — Page 2 of 4 — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

December 22, 2017

It’s not a stretch: Avoid those over-use boo-boos, older yogis are warned

For seniors who may be rushing to squeeze in a few more pretzel-twisting sessions to ease their stress from a hectic holiday season, this is a gentle reminder: Take it easy with the yoga. It can be good for you, but don’t overdo it or you may hurt yourself.

The Washington Post reported that the number of yoga devotees has climbed to an estimated 36.7 million Americans, many of whom find that stretching and posing in various styles makes them breathe and feel better, as well being more limber, focused, and relaxed. Yoga also has special appeal to older practitioners, 17 percent of them in their 50s and 21 percent 60 and older, according to a study conducted by a yoga publication.

But public health researchers from the University of Alabama Birmingham, after examining electronic data on almost 30,000 yoga-related injuries that led patients to emergency room treatment between 2001 and 2014, reported that:

December 5, 2017

Does modern medicine give patients with major brain trauma really fair care?

by Patrick A. Malone

Nick Tullier once was a handsome, strapping sheriff’s deputy in Baton Rouge, La. Then, in a blink, he and five others were gunned down by a former Marine and black separatist who had come from Missouri to Louisiana to kill cops. Tullier was one of three deputies who survived the attack.

What happened next to him is part of a series worth reading in the Houston Chronicle, a year-long dig the newspaper has dubbed “Alive Inside.” The work asks whether doctors and hospitals across the country have stayed current with medical advances that maybe, just might, possibly offer greater glimmers of hope to patients like Tullier who suffer traumatic brain injuries.

Such individuals, the Chronicle carefully says, may too quickly be deemed too injured to survive. Doctors, in sincere acts of perceived compassion, may be too fast to urge family and loved ones to withhold or halt medical services for the brain-injured, partly out of the pragmatic reality that their recovery prospects remain poor.

October 6, 2017

For young athletes, head contact and infections can pose costly risks

by Patrick A. Malone

Parents happily send their eager youngsters off to a demanding array of sports activities, in the belief that athletics will improve their health and well-being. But, especially for active young men, life as a jock can carry costly long-term risks and immediate infection perils.

A Yale economist and colleagues have scrutinized available public data and estimated that by changing some contact sports like football into their less violent forms (like touch or flag versions), almost 50,000 fewer collegiate and 600,000 or so high school injuries would be averted. Figuring in the costs of medical care and time lost, this could mean a savings of $1.5 billion at the college level and $19.2 billion for high schools.

The researchers came to these big sum conclusions after looking at four types of serious injuries: concussions and damage to the nervous system, bone injuries, torn tissue, and muscle and cartilage injuries. They said that the popularity and prevalence of high contact sports like football in explaining why athletics’ economic toll can be so high.

February 24, 2017

Low back pain? Try exercise before drugs, doctors say

by Patrick A. Malone

Back pain is one of Americans’ leading debilitating complaints, prompting us to spend billions of dollars annually for relief and costing more than $100 billion, especially in lost work and wages. But an influential physicians’ group, joining a growing number of other experts, now recommends that we buck up, exercise, keep moving—and stay away from a reflexive reach for drugs, especially powerful painkillers, to deal with aching backs.

The American College of Physicians, with guidelines published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, concedes it is breaking with longstanding medical views on treating low back pain. But the group’s experts said they conducted a “systematic review of randomized, controlled trials and systematic reviews published through April 2015 on noninvasive pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic treatments for low back pain.”

They found that many patients with low back pain recovered over time “regardless of treatment,” and these individuals might benefit most from heat, rest, exercise, and over the counter, non-steroidal medications. Another group of back pain sufferers might need physical therapy, stress reduction, acupuncture, yoga, or ta-chi. Only after patients have not found relief with “non-pharmacological therapy,” should doctors consider giving non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen or naproxen. If these don’t work, tramadol (Cymbalta) or duloxetine (Ultram) might be considered.

January 3, 2017

More spent on health care in U.S. than on everything in Britain

by Patrick A. Malone

What if you bought the hottest car around, only to find a neighbor found a model just as sporty and paid much less? How would you react if you opened your credit card bill and learned that the family budget was in tatters because your daughter commuted a few blocks to school by taxi, and your son had racked up huge charges for junky electronic gadgets and questionable movies online? Your consternation would be a tiny fraction of the great concern that most of us should experience due to a new study that finds that Americans spent $3.2 trillion on health care in 2014.

If you’re like me, when figures get that big, they become hard to grasp. But for comparison’s sake, the United States’ medical spending exceeded the 2015 gross domestic product (the monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced within a given country’s borders in a specific time period) for the economies of: Britain, France, Canada, Russia, Italy, Mexico, Indonesia, Australia, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and the Netherlands.

Americans spent more on back and neck pain than Russia did on its military and national defense.

November 8, 2016

Surgeon jailed in Dallas, as details unwind still of his terrible spine surgery spree

by Patrick A. Malone

Just how difficult can it be to stop a highly credentialed but dangerous doctor from hop-scotching around a metropolitan area to perform brutal spinal surgeries in different hospitals, including a respected academic medical center? Just ask crippled patients, neurosurgeons, medical licensing officials, and prosecutors in Dallas what it took to derail Dr. Christopher Duntsch.

As detailed well in the latest edition of the upscale city magazine D, Duntsch was a high-flying physician who moved from Tennessee to Texas, carrying with him an excellent reputation, which later would be challenged, as a medical scientist. Although established as a cancer stem cell-researcher, the neurosurgeon also morphed himself into a spinal surgeon based on training earlier in his career. He eventually won privileges to operate at three Dallas area hospitals, including the well-regarded Baylor Regional Medical Center at Plano, Texas.

He was a loner and boastful, though colleagues liked him at first. They quickly were horrified by his surgeries. Among the damages he is criminally accused of inflicting: amputating a patient’s spinal nerve, causing paralysis; cutting another patient’s vertebral artery and ignoring the major bleeding that occurred; installing a too-long screw so that it punctured a big vein, causing extensive bleeding and nerve damage; slashing a patient’s esophagus and a neck artery, leaving the man struggling to eat, breathe, and with blood loss to the brain.

November 3, 2016

South Dakota high court won’t force hospitals to disclose why they let a bad doctor operate on patients’ spines

by Patrick A. Malone

South Dakotans will need their state lawmakers’ help now to pry open physicians’ iron grip on secret decisions about which doctors get to practice in hospitals and why. That’s because the state’s Supreme Court ruled this vital information must be kept confidential, even if releasing it would serve a wider good of disclosing possible criminal or fraudulent conduct.

The high court ducked its potential role in helping more than 30 patients who claim they were mangled in excruciating, needless surgeries performed by Allen Sossan, an osteopath with an easily discovered criminal past and a checkered medical practice record in the area around Yankton, S.D. I’ve written about this case before.

Several South Dakota hospitals gave Sossan practice privileges after his credentials were reviewed by physician committees, which, since have fought mightily to keep secret what they knew and when they knew it about him. Sossan since has been indicted for providing false information to medical licensing authorities. The convicted burglar and check kiter apparently has fled the country and may be back in his native Iran.

October 25, 2016

Federal auditors assail $359 million in Medicare costs for chiropractic care

by Patrick A. Malone

Federal auditors have found that 80 percent of Medicare spending in a recent year on chiropractic care−some $359 million−was medically unnecessary. The federal insurance program for senior citizens should not have thrown taxpayer dollars at chiropractors to treat strains, sprains, or joint conditions, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General says.

Its auditors, reporting on 2013 claims, said Medicare should impose limits on how often seniors can receive chiropractic care, which they said became excessive after a dozen visits; after 30 sessions of treatment, the federal watchdogs said, patients were receiving unnecessary care.

The chiropractors’ association denounced the audit and the proposed curbs on their practitioners’ care. The acting director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services resisted the recommendations for caps on chiropractic treatment, noting the absence of cited evidence and differences in individual patients. The agency noted that it has tightened its rules on chiropractic claims, including requirements soon to take force that will require advance approval for certain kinds of this care.

October 12, 2016

S. Dakota high court asked to pry open hospitals’ secret approval of brutal MD

by Patrick A. Malone

South Dakota’s highest court has been asked to reject hospitals’ attempts to keep secret why a doctor, who also is a convicted burglar with a checkered medical past that could have easily been uncovered, passed a peer review that permitted him to perform brutal, excruciating, and unnecessary spinal surgeries on dozens of patients.

A lower court rejected the sweeping claims by the hospitals that the reviews can never be disclosed. The judge said that indications of crimes or fraud, as raised by evidence-based malpractice lawsuits, are sufficient reason to breach confidentiality protections shielding vital insights into how hospitals judge physician performance and permit doctors to practice in their institutions.

More than 30 patients have sued surgeon Allen Sossan. He is a convicted felon, who had changed his name, and who apparently has fled to Iran. Patients assert he caused them great pain and maimed them with unnecessary, complex back procedures. Further, patients have sued more than a dozen doctors who reviewed his credentials and granted him privileges at Avera Sacred Heart and Lewis & Clark Specialty Hospital, both in Yankton, S.D.

July 6, 2016

Where are regulators as hundreds offer so-called ‘stem cell’ care?

by Patrick A. Malone

Beneficial therapies can topple over to medical nightmares in a blink, especially when regulators seem to have looked askance or even shut their eyes and slumbered. The Food and Drug Administration may need to look into what is going on with the burgeoning business of so-called stem cell treatments.

Two academics took to the Internet and found “at least 351 businesses in 570 locations …marketing stem cell therapies that have not been fully vetted by medical researchers or blessed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,” they reported in the peer reviewed, academic journal Cell Stem Cell.

To be sure, they did not visit the facilities in person, and they use care not to describe any of them as violating state or federal laws or regulations. They used rigorous, robust online means, though, to look at the operations’ Internet pitches, which, as The Los Angeles Times notes: