Cleveland Medical Malpractice Law Blog

Most Cleveland residents who have undergone a surgical procedure will tell you that it can be a nerve-racking experience. Lying in a hospital bed or gurney, having a nurse prepare you for surgery and hoping the operation will be a success is stressful, even when the procedure you require is relatively mild.

Patients going into surgery would like to believe that the physicians and medical staff performing the surgery are highly skilled and able to prevent basic accidents from occurring. But unfortunately, that is not always the case and patients sometimes become injured due to easily preventable errors.

Readers in the Cleveland area who believe that open and honest communication between doctors and patients is the best way to ensure high-quality health care will probably be dismayed to learn that one in three doctors surveyed for a new study did not think that serious medical errors need to be disclosed to patients. But that is what researchers behind a study published in this month's issue of the journal Health Affairs discovered.

The report finds that 34 percent of doctors who participated in the survey did not check "completely agree" in answer to the statement that physicians should disclose all significant medical errors to their patients. A significant number of the doctors have put that theory into practice, with 20 percent of physicians admitting that they either covered up medical errors or did not tell the whole truth. A smaller number, 11 percent, said they have actively lied to a patient within the past year.

Around one million packets of birth-control medication manufactured by drug maker Pfizer Inc. are being recalled after a packaging error was discovered that could put users at risk of getting off their dosage cycle and becoming pregnant accidently. The affected birth-control products are called Lo/Ovral-28 and a generic medication called Norgestrel and Ethinyl Estradiol.

Pfizer said it discovered that some packages of the drugs had the wrong number of pills with the active drugs. Oral birth control packages typically come with 21 hormone pills and seven sugar tablets to properly regulate the user's hormone levels during her menstruation cycle. The packets had either too many sugar tablets or too few. A spokeswoman said that Pfizer believes the packaging defect was due to employee and mechanical errors. The problem has been corrected, the spokeswoman said.

As Ohio residents know, medicine is used to assist people with recovery from various illnesses. Most of the time, medicinal technology works as it is supposed to by assisting and supporting the person in the need. Nevertheless, sometimes medications are defective and do not operate as expected. In some cases, this causes harm to the individual that has used the drug.

In a recent story, family members of a Utah woman have filed a wrongful death suit against a pharmaceutical company. According to reports, the drug corporation manufactured a faulty pain-relief patch. Court documents explain that the California-based corporation knowingly produced transdermal patches that released unsafe amounts of fentanyl, a synthetic drug approximately 100 times stronger than morphine.