The Nebraska Injury Law Report

This was nice to see: “Lost Pants Litigant Gets Nothing“.

Perhaps this will restore some of the faith in lawyers and the legal system that this lawyer cost us.

The Denver Post reports on this nearly unbelievable story of a death caused by a sports cream:
A medical examiner blamed a 17-year-old track star’s death on the use of too much anti- inflammatory muscle cream, the kind used to soothe aching legs after exercise.

Arielle Newman, a cross-country runner at Notre Dame Academy on Staten Island, died after her body absorbed high levels of methyl salicylate, an anti-inflammatory found in sports creams such as Bengay and Icy Hot, the New York City medical examiner said Friday.

The medical examiner’s spokeswoman, Ellen Borakove, said the teen used “topical medication to excess.” She said it was the first time that her office had reported a death from using a sports cream.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to the negligence of another, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

These facts on drowning from the Centers for Disease Control:

In 2004, there were 3,308 unintentional fatal drownings in the United States, averaging nine people per day. This figure does not include the 676 fatalities, from drowning and other causes, due to boating-related incidents (CDC 2006; USCG 2006).

For every child 14 years and younger who dies from drowning in 2004, five receive emergency department care for nonfatal submersion injuries. More than half of these children were hospitalized or transferred to another facility for treatment (CDC 2006).

Nonfatal drownings can cause brain damage that result in long-term disabilities ranging from memory problems and learning disabilities to the permanent loss of basic functioning (i.e., permanent vegetative state).

Boating carries risks for injury. In 2005, the U.S. Coast Guard received reports for 4,969 boating incidents; 3,451 participants were reported injured, and 697 died in boating incidents.

If you or a loved one have been injured around water due to the negligence of another, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

From The New York Times:

A federal jury on Tuesday awarded $5.5 million to the father of a man who died while wearing a drug patch made by two Johnson & Johnson subsidiaries.

The jury in Federal District Court in West Palm Beach found that Janssen Pharmaceutica Products and the Alza Corporation, both based in New Jersey, were liable in the death of Adam Hendelson, 28, who died in 2003 while wearing the companies’ Duragesic patch.

The patch delivers controlled doses of the powerful painkiller fentanyl.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to medical negligence, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

The Houston Chronicle reports:

State Farm Fire & Casualty Co. engaged in a “pattern of racketeering” by manipulating engineering reports on Hurricane Katrina damage so the company could deny policyholder claims, lawyers for a group of Mississippi homeowners allege in a lawsuit filed Wednesday.

The federal suit against State Farm represents a new legal strategy for attorney Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, who has played a prominent role in challenging the insurance industry for its handling of Katrina claims.

Hundreds of homeowners in Mississippi and Louisiana have sued their insurers for denying their claims after the Aug. 29, 2005, storm. The suits typically accuse insurers of bad faith and breach of contract for refusing to pay for damage from Katrina’s storm surge.

If you have been the victim of insurance bad faith, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

Law.com reports that the use of electronic communications between doctor and pharmacy may help cut down on mistakes:

The widespread use of electronic systems to send prescriptions from doctors to pharmacies promises to prevent thousands of life-threatening medical errors, save billions of dollars in health care costs and even drive more business to drug stores.

Still, the vast majority of U.S. physicians have yet to adopt electronic prescribing, or e-prescribing, for the estimated 4 billion prescriptions they write annually, a situation that a phalanx of corporations and the government are working to change. One coalition promoting e-prescribing estimates that as many as 20 percent of the 550,000 practicing U.S. physicians had the technology to send e-prescriptions, but that only 5 percent actually have been using it.

With e-prescribing, physicians can use hand-held or desktop computers or “smart” mobile phones to send patient drug prescriptions to pharmacy computers.

Beyond conveying prescriptions, systems can alert doctors to potential drug interactions or dosing problems, eliminate handwriting errors, automate the time-consuming renewal process, provide data on a patient’s drug plan, and potentially cut thousands of pharmacy calls to doctors. Hospitals, insurers, technology companies, regional collaboratives and pharmacies have been working to advance adoption of e-prescribing.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to a medical error, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

Even Thomas the Tank Engine’s buddy James is having his problems.

The New York Times reports: “The toy maker RC2 Corporation pulled a number of its Thomas & Friends trains and accessory parts off the shelves yesterday after learning that the red and yellow paint used to decorate more than 1.5 million of the toys contained lead. The James Engine is . . . being recalled because the red and yellow paint used to decorate them contains lead. Lead, if ingested by children, can cause long-term neurological problems that affect learning and behavior.”

If you or a loved one have been injured due to a defective product, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons warns about the dangers of “heelys,” the newest shoe craze among adolescents:

The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) stresses the importance of protective gear while engaging in a particularly new phenomenon…heeling. Heeleys – also known as roller shoes or street gliders – are shoes that have a wheel on the heel. These types of shoes fall into the category of inline skates which qualifies them as a sport, and carries warnings for their use including wearing protective gear such as wrist guards and helmets to avoid injuries.

According to James H. Beaty, MD, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon and president of AAOS, “Orthopaedic surgeons are in fact seeing children come into their practices with injuries due to heeleys, mostly of a fracture-type within the hand, wrist or elbow.”

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission now reports over 1,600 emergency room visits in 2006 due to wheel and roller shoes.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to a dangerous product, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

A slip and a fall–it can happen to anyone. Even famous judges. The New York Times reports:

In his days as a legal scholar, Robert H. Bork, the onetime Supreme Court nominee, engaged, as many scholars do, in high-minded debates about the august issues of the law. He wrote widely — sometimes controversially — about antitrust issues, the right to privacy and the limitations of the First Amendment.

Yesterday, however, Mr. Bork, who is 80, waded into a somewhat less majestic area of law. After a tumble at the Yale Club in Manhattan last year while ascending to the dais to deliver a speech, he filed a common everyday trip-and-fall lawsuit against the club.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to the negligence of another, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

Dr. Atul Gawande says that like all of us doctors make mistakes. Gawande is the bestselling author whose book “Complications” inspired the television show “Grey’s Anatomy.” From an article in The Guardian

Gawande is a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. And he still makes mistakes. It’s this uncomfortable wound that he has opened up, first in Complications - his bestselling book that was shortlisted for the National Book prize in the US and became the inspiration for the TV series Grey’s Anatomy - and now in his follow-up, Better.

“What I’m interested in is failure,” he says, “as it’s the one area of medicine with which the professionals are often reluctant to engage because the stakes we are playing for are so high. We can fail by putting a decimal point in the wrong place and by not asking the right questions. If you ask any doctor when he or she last made a misdiagnosis, the truthful answer would always be in the last month. We get things wrong and we try to put them right. And, of course, we can fail with a slip of the hand. I once performed an emergency trachaeotomy in which I did everything wrong. I had the wrong knife, the wrong lights and I made the wrong incision. There was blood everywhere and the patient would have died if a colleague hadn’t stepped in to help. It was horrific.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to a medical mistake, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.