Medical: November 2008 Archives

A Suffolk woman's lawsuit over the removal of her deceased husband's brain is among a growing number of legal actions nationwide that raise ethical and legal questions about how scientists acquire body parts for research.  Newsday.com writes:

In Manhattan, Mount Sinai Medical Center - named as a defendant in the Suffolk case - maintains a brain bank that has obtained at least 675 specimens from the brains of patients who died at Pilgrim Psychiatric Center in Brentwood.... Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, served as an expert witness in some of the Maine cases. He said that the issue of what constitutes consent is sometimes poorly defined in the law. "No state, including New York, is particularly aggressive in giving oversight to tissue collection," Caplan said.

A medical malpractice case that awarded $5.3 million to a London teenager and her family may be heading to the Supreme Court of Canada after Ontario's highest court ordered a new trial this week. The Ontario Court of Appeal sent back a civil case that took eight months to try in London and included testimony from experts who came from as far away as California. The original case ended with a decision against Victoria Hospital in February 2007 that $5.3 million be awarded to the London teen and her family but the appeal court said last week that none of the expert witnesses testified the injuries were caused in the way Superior Court Justice Helen Rady concluded.

Rady held that the nursing staff had breached protocol by not checking the fetal heart beat for ninety minutes when Alecia Fisher was born.  If they had followed protocol, the asphyxia that caused Alecia's cerebral palsy may have been detected.

For more, see LondonFreePress.

Lafayette, LA, cardiologist Mehmood Patel faces 91 counts of health-care fraud after a 2003 federal investigation and February 2006 indictment accuses him of performing what prosecutors and their witnesses have called "medically unnecessary procedures."  The Advertiser reports:

The investigation stemmed from allegations that Patel was placing stents and performing unnecessary coronary intervention procedures for money... Throughout the case, prosecutors have accused Patel of putting information on patient charts despite what patients told him during initial doctor's visits.

Prosecution expert witnesses testified earlier that a female patient had little blockage in her arteries, thus eliminating the need for a stent and angioplasty procedures he performed.

The study shows that heart valve problems linked to the banned obesity drugs fenfluramine and/or dexfenfluramine typically last years after stopping those drugs... Three of the four researchers who worked on the study... have served as expert witnesses for plaintiffs in lawsuits related to fen-phen but say that since those lawsuits are over, they don't have any current financial conflicts of interest.

The FDA ordered fenfluramine and dexfenfluramine off the market in September 1997 after those drugs were linked to heart valve problems. Fenfluramine was one of the ingredients in "fen-phen," and dexfenfluramine is closely related to fenfluramine. The "phen" in fen-phen refers to a drug called phentermine, which wasn't banned.

The new study, published online today in BMC Medicine, shows what happened to the hearts of 5,743 former users of fenfluramine and/or dexfenfluramine.

For more, see WedMD Health News.

In Surveys Note Americans’ Medical Debt Grows as Economy Worsens, Workforce.com writes on how the economic downturn is leading to an increase in unpaid medical bills.  Large employers may end up subsidizing bills in the coming months through premium increases and spikes in medical costs. The healthcare expert CFO of Fletcher Allen Health Care, Roger Deshaies, says charity care has increased 10 percent in the year ended September 30 because many patients with high-deductible plans are unable to pay the deductible. “If they have a deductible of $1,500, their chances of meeting that is limited at a time when heat and fuel are going up considerably,” he said.

The hospital system, which projects charity care costs will double next year if the economic downturn deepens, is already approaching health insurance companies seeking increases in the amount they are reimbursed for care provided to people with employer-sponsored health plans.

In Surveys Note Americans’ Medical Debt Grows as Economy Worsens, Workforce.com writes: The economic downturn is leading to an increase in unpaid medical bills that large employers may end up subsidizing in the coming months through premium increases and spikes in medical costs.

Saying they are forced to choose between food, housing, transportation and other necessities, Americans are increasingly unable to pay their medical bills, leading many into deep medical debt, according to several surveys released recently. Medical experts at the The Kaiser Family Foundation reported in October that one in three Americans report trouble paying medical bills, while 18 percent of Americans say their medical bills have totaled more than $1,000 in the past year.

The weakening economy isn’t affecting only the uninsured. Medical debt is particularly common among Americans with high-deductible plans, the Commonwealth Fund reported. The New York-based health policy research organization said 53 percent of adults whose deductible equaled or exceeded 5 percent of their income “incurred medical bill burdens and debt.”