Corpus Christi, Texas will be the venue for the first jury trial to determine whether welding rods cause Parkinson Disease symptoms. Over 3800 lawsuits have been filed in the U.S, consolidated for supervision by a Cleveland Federal District Court. The suits allege that high expsures to manganese and
Newly released corporate documents show that, last year, Guidant drafted but never sent a detailed document to physicians which would have disclosed significant defects in its heart devices. Instead, executives of the company defended their failure to warn doctors by citing concerns that patients wo
In a 5 to 4 Decision, split on conservative and liberal basis, The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal employees, who complain about misconduct by superiors, have no Freedom of Speech rights in the workplace. The opinion affects about 20 million federal employees who, the Court ruled, are not enti
A month after I blogged about Fosamax, the NY Times has run a front page story on the horrible dilemma facing patients with cancer or osteoporosis. The FDA has now required bisphosphonate labels to disclose the serious side effects of death of areas of bone in the jaw, which may occur in one of 10 p
Every now and then bad things happen to good people who are related to a doctor, and when they do, doctors file Medical Malpractice Lawsuits just like every other victim deserves to do. Recently, in Tacoma, Washington, an anesthesiologist sued the hospital where he once worked, asserting that the st
A professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin has conducted a new study which showed that shocks from Tasers cause the hearts of healthy pigs to stop beating. This finding contradicts the previous research financed by, guess who, Taser International. The new study took into ac
You can’t believe everything you read, even in Medical Journals. Merck deliberately withheld information about three heart attacks from its data when the New England Journal of Medicine reported on VIoxx in March of 2000. Recently, Merck’s spin machine is citing new data about patients who stopped u
A study based on FDA records for the last 10 years found that 164,000 external defibrillators (one out of every five) were subject to recall or agency alert. The data included 370 reports of deaths in which the defibrillator malfunctioned. Actually, the number was much higher, 801 adverse-event repo
Several Medical Safety Groups have criticized the makers of heart devices, like defibrillators and pacemakers, for failing to alert doctors to life-threatening flaws in their products. The physicians believe the these companies don’t fully assess the patient consequences because engineers, rather th
After analyzing the data collected from about 15,000 patients, the FDA has written a letter to doctors and patients of newly discovered links between antidepressant PAXIL and an increased risk of suicides. The latest data revealed that 11 young patients (late teens to thirties) had attempted suicide
This week’s winner of the “Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction” award goes to the $1.7 Million verdict against Alarm One for spanking a female salesperson “for motivation”. A California jury rejected the defense argument that the spankings were not discriminatory because they were given to both male and
Good News. The U.S. Merit Protection Board has overturned a 2004 ruling by an Administrative Law Judge so that federal doctors can be guaranteed the same protection as other Federal Whistleblowers. This protects thousands of federal doctors and medical researchers, so called Title 42 workers who wor