Emergency Medicine Category Archives — Page 2 of 39 — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

November 1, 2022

Buckling up and buckling down: D.C. is failing on 2024 road safety goal

Officials in the District of Columbia must match commitment to candor if they hope to achieve a long-promised goal of reducing the terrible toll on area roads.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser pledged in 2015 to reduce traffic fatalities in the district to zero by 2024 — a goal she has conceded her administration has “fallen short” on and will struggle to meet. As the mayor noted in her updating of her “Vision Zero” safety initiative, the Washington Post reported quoting Bowser:

“Our original target of achieving zero deaths by 2024 was ambitious and has not been without its challenges.”

October 30, 2022

Seasonal flu hitting early and hard, increasing fears of ‘tripledemic’

by Patrick A. Malone

The damage that seasonal flu causes can be difficult to forecast. But doctors, hospitals, and public health experts already are seeing the illness hit “hard and early,” especially in the Washington, D.C., area.

The indicators are shaping up that this will be the most severe flu year in the last 13. This is exponentially concerning, as hospitals also struggle with spiking pediatric cases of various respiratory illnesses, especially respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, the Washington Post reported and other news organizations have reported.

Chilly weather is starting to grip much of the country, forcing people indoors, and the coronavirus pandemic persists.

October 25, 2022

A reckoning for FDA fast drug approvals and moms’ mistreatment

by Patrick A. Malone

Federal regulators have hit a highly public reckoning for their policies to provide speedy approvals for prescription drugs, benefiting Big Pharma’s profits but not necessarily patients — notably women in serious need of help with a shame of the U.S. health care system: the nation’s dismal state with injuries and deaths to expectant moms and infants.

The federal Food and Drug Administration 11 years ago gave Covis Pharma an expedited review and approval to market its prescription drug Makena, which the maker promoted as a rare medication to prevent preterm births.

In exchange, the company was supposed to conduct broader, rigorous, and more detailed studies to prove definitively that Makena prevents moms from delivering before 37 weeks, which is a serious problem that affected 1 in 10 births in 2020 alone, the New York Times reported. The newspaper also noted that preterm births are a greater problem for black women:

October 23, 2022

With pandemic persisting, pediatric respiratory cases filling hospitals

by Patrick A. Malone

Lest anyone think the coronavirus pandemic is not taking a significant toll on this country still, just look at the worrisome conditions prevailing in overflowing pediatric hospitals and the bracing data on how whites gradually have become more likely to die from the infectious disease than blacks.

Doctors and hospitals say they are struggling with a desperate lack of pediatric space to care for increasing numbers of children with various respiratory illnesses, especially respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. This is a major problem in the DMV (the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia) where hospitals told the Washington Post that they full up with sick kids and scrambling:

“Children’s National Hospital in Northwest D.C., as well as the children’s hospitals at Inova Fairfax in Northern Virginia and the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, which represent a total of more than 650 beds, are at capacity, physicians at the hospitals said this week. Pediatricians locally and nationally report a spike in cases of respiratory illnesses such as RSV and rhinovirus — the common cold virus — which for the second consecutive year have hit earlier and made kids sicker than usual. At the same time, the coronavirus continues to circulate, and hospitals are bracing for a severe flu season.”

October 21, 2022

Savvy consumers are getting flu and covid shots (hint, hint)

by Patrick A. Malone

As many as 4 in 20 patients infected with the coronavirus report they have not fully recovered after months and 1 in 20 of those with the disease say they have not recovered at all. The viral illness, which has claimed more than 1 million lives and has infected more than 97 million of us, still kills just under 400 people daily on average.

Meantime, the southeast and south central parts of the United States — including the District of Columbia — are reporting the nation’s highest rates of influenza cases, as this infection is showing an early season surge. Just a reminder that in pre-pandemic times, flu sickened as many as 41 million Americans annually, leading to as many as 700,000-plus hospitalizations, and up to 50,000-plus deaths.

After years now of coping with the catastrophic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, and especially with the sustained harms of long covid, and with evidence growing that this year’s flu season will be tough and break with a recent period of mild caseloads, why aren’t more folks using common sense and getting safe, effective vaccinations to increase their protection against these debilitating and lethal diseases?

October 11, 2022

Pro sports show seamy sides in mistreating women and head trauma

by Patrick A. Malone

While fans may wax poetic about how sports show humanity at its finest, the grim and even sleazy aspects of U.S. games also have been on full display in recent days.

The poohbahs of two of the nation’s most popular pastimes have acted poorly and spoken loudly as to how, maybe they don’t really give a whit about players’ health and well-being, permitting perversity and demeaning behaviors to flourish in women’s soccer and brutality and an almost willful medical blindness to rise anew in pro football for head trauma.

What are parents supposed to tell their kids about such sports “role models?”

October 4, 2022

Rethinking urgent care after vehicle wrecks (and one simple way to stay safe on a bicycle)

by Patrick A. Malone

With U.S. road deaths spiking 20-year highs, everyone who travels in any fashion on the country’s roads must be as savvy as possible about staying safe, including by thinking twice about where to go to receive medical checks and treatment after any seemingly minor vehicle wrecks and by forgoing bike riding while high on drugs or booze.

In recent times, patients have found urgent care centers to be a handy alternative as compared with big hospital emergency rooms for getting fast, less costly care for less complicated but still relatively serious illnesses and injuries (including for sports mishaps, cuts, and broken bones). Why not turn to such facilities after a vehicle crash, if not otherwise taken to a jammed, expensive hospital ER for major treatment? As NPR reported, such patients with lower medical demands still have been surprised that urgent care centers have turned them around and sent them to nearby ERs.

This happened to a young Georgia driver named Frankie Cook, who with her dad also then was shocked at the $17,000 cost of the ER care for scans and exam to determine if she suffered a concussion in a wreck that seemed to have left her with no visible injuries and a headache. As NPR explained:

October 2, 2022

Big hospitals’ buck-raking schemes exploit poor and pile on medical debt

by Patrick A. Malone

Big hospitals and hospital chains that enjoy the financial and reputational benefits of nonprofit or charitable status have taken major fire for maximizing profits while piling on patients’ crushing medical debt and exploiting the poorest and most vulnerable of the injured and sick.

Medical economists, in recent times, have zeroed in on hospitals and their opaque pricing schemes and sky-high costs as important contributors to the ever-rising, nosebleed U.S. spending on health care. Americans pay more on average than any consumers on the planet, while seeing some of the worst outcomes among peers in advanced nations. And with a third of U.S. health care spending flowing into hospitals — more than $1 trillion annually — shouldn’t the suits running institutions and big chains have expected greater scrutiny of their business practices?

Kudos to the nonpartisan Kaiser Health News service and NPR for showing how hospitals in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are thriving — by saddling patients in that metropolis with some of the heaviest per capita medical debt to be found anywhere in the country.

September 7, 2022

Risks rising for little kids ingesting button- and lithium coin-batteries

by Patrick A. Malone

As manufacturers press to shrink electronic devices, small children across the country are getting put at high risk of big harms by swallowing small button- and lithium coin-batteries, research shows.

The round, shiny, and ubiquitous batteries have proven to be irresistible to the pint-sized and curious, who gulp them down after they find them scattered around or pry them free from an array of gadgets, including, the New York Times reported, “television remotes, key fobs, thermometers, scales, toys, flame-free candles — even singing greeting cards.”

Grownups can be shocked by the damage the objects can cause, the newspaper reported:

September 4, 2022

With Omicron vaccines approved, U.S. pushes for fall flu and Covid shots

by Patrick A. Malone

As summer ends, millions of Americans should pop around the corner for a healthy double — that is, a pair of vaccinations, one targeted against the latest, widely circulating coronavirus Omicron variants and the other shot to fight the seasonal flu, federal health officials say.

The newest booster for the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron variants should be available at drug stores, clinics, and doctors’ offices this coming week, regulators at the federal Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Infection have decided.

The coronavirus shots, as occurs with annual flu vaccines, will be based on existing products that have been given to huge populations globally — safely, with great effectiveness, but now without extensive clinical trials that were conducted of previous formulas of the vaccines.