Medical Malpractice Lawyers

Your Best Malpractice Law Firm Advice: Don’t Take Your Doctor’s Word for It

Wondering if you’ve been the victim of medical malpractice? Don’t just take your doctor’s word for it. It’s always best to review your case with a malpractice law firm in Cleveland such as the Linton Law Firm. A recent exclusive 5 on Your Side Investigation uncovered numerous instances of doctors and hospitals covering up or omitting critical medical errors.

Though medical practitioners are legally required to track medical mistakes, that information is often hidden from both patients and the public, the report found.

“People who are injured as a result of medical malpractice are almost never told that has happened by their doctors or by hospitals where it’s happened,” Maxwell Mehlman, the Director of the Law-Medicine Center at Case Western Reserve University, told the news agency.

One case in point is Parma resident Lyn Adanich, who claims errors made by the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center during her husband’s routine dental implant surgery were never disclosed. Surgical gauze was left in 69-year-old Donald Adanich’s stomach for three weeks. Doctors discovered the gauze later, but failed to tell the couple. They only found out after getting a second opinion from another doctor after the left over gauze resulted in a massive stomach infection. He never recovered, and died in August 2014, six months after the dental surgery.

You can bet Ms. Adanich is now consulting her malpractice law firm in Cleveland. The question remains: What isn’t your doctor telling you?

A Troubling Statistic for Any Nursing Home Injury Lawyer in Cleveland

How common is nursing home abuse? The statistic is shocking. Roughly 10 percent of the elderly have been victims of abuse, NPR recently reported, citing a recent review article published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It is a fact that a nursing home injury lawyer in Cleveland is all too familiar with.

For comparison, that is only slightly lower than the African American percentage of the US population (13.2 percent), or the percentage of Americans who are 65 years old or older (14.5 percent), reported in the US Census.

And the situation is likely far worse than reported. “That figure, researchers note, is likely an underestimate, since it’s based on self-reported cases and its victims often suffer from dementia or are otherwise isolated from people who might notice something is wrong,” NPR reporter Shefali Luthra stated in the article.

The challenge is getting the abuse reported and holding those responsible accountable. Nursing home abuse can dramatically increase the risk of death and often results in long term harm, including the exacerbation of physical and mental ailments.

“These cases do not resolve magically – often these play out over months or years,” said Mark Lachs, the paper’s lead author and director for the Center of Aging Research and Clinical Care at Cornell University, told NPR.

If you believe that your loved one has been the victim of elder abuse, contact a nursing home injury lawyer in Cleveland. They deserve to have you advocate on their behalf. Indeed, their very lives may depend on it.

A Case That a Cancer Misdiagnosis Attorney in Cleveland Rarely Encounters: Intentional Misdiagnosis

As any cancer diagnosis attorney in Cleveland will tell you, misdiagnosing cancer is not always a case of negligence. In some cases, it is a punishable crime that deserves jail time, not to mention financial restitution to the victims involved. A doctor in Michigan recently received a 45 year prison sentence for intentionally misdiagnosing cancer in hundreds of healthy patients purely to bill them for his services and line his own pockets.

Prosecutors originally sought a 175 year prison sentence for Dr. Farid Fata, according to the Wall St. Journal. Fata pleaded guilty to Medicare fraud last year. Authorities suspect more than 500 people suffered through the intentional misdiagnoses. More than 150 alleged victims filed impact statements in court.

“I’m here because I don’t want this to happen to anyone else,” Marietta Crabtree testified in court. Her husband, Donald Crabtree, died of kidney cancer at the age of 79 after receiving what his family claims was improper chemotherapy treatment to treat a case of lung cancer that actually did not exist. “We trusted him and we never thought that we couldn’t.”

The cancer misdiagnosis was blatant and intentional.

“Fata single handedly designed the fraud, which necessitated fooling his own employees and professional staff,” federal prosecutors contended in a court memorandum.

Most cases a cancer misdiagnosis attorney in Cleveland comes across are the result of negligence. Rarely are they an intentional act. Nonetheless, any case of misdiagnosis can be deadly, either in delaying treatment or resulting in patients receiving chemotherapy for cancer they do not actually have, ironically resulting in giving them a deadly cancer.