For years, obstetricians and hospitals have tried to deflect attention from their mistakes by claiming that negligence during labor and delivery — like prolonged labor where a baby is deprived of oxygen, or where the delivery is traumatic — can’t cause cerebral palsy. I’ve written before about the problems with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ guidelines on “Neonatal Encephalopathy and Cerebral Palsy.” Now there’s a new study of over a million births confirming that a lack of oxygen during birth is by far the most common cause of cerebral palsy. On March 7, 2017, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a study of over 1.4 million births in Sweden. The purpose of the study was to look for any connection between overweight or obese mothers and cerebral palsy. The authors found a link, but, as they say, “the effect of maternal obesity on cerebral palsy” was “small compared with other risk factors.” So what really causes cerebral palsy? The biggest culprit is a lack of oxygen. […]

A new study in The Journal of Patient Safety proves again what medical malpractice lawyers have known for years: the worst doctors cause a very large part of medical malpractice injuries. The study, “The Detection, Analysis, and Significance of Physician Clustering in Medical Malpractice Lawsuit Payouts,” reviewed payment data from the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), an electronic database that follows malpractice settlements, actions by state medicine boards, and actions by hospital medical boards. The medical researchers looked at all of the malpractice compensation from September 1, 1990, through June 30, 2015, a time period during which over 1.2 million physicians practiced medicine in the United States. Incredibly, 25% of the payments in that time could be traced back to just 6,521 physicians, and 50% of the payments could be traced back to 22,511, which amounts to just 1.8% of all physicians who practiced then. […]

On December 14, 2016, the FDA released a new "Drug Safety Communication" about the use of general anesthetics and sedation drugs [...]

Doctors are obligated to stay informed of the latest developments in their field. But that's not always easy: every year, [...]

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (“ACOG”) is hardly the most objective source of medical information. As we discussed [...]

For lawyers who represent birth malpractice victims, few phrases conjure up as much ire and frustration as “the ACOG report,” [...]

In most medical malpractice cases, the default defense is: “medicine is so complex and mysterious that there is no standard [...]

For years, I’ve written about the prevailing myths about medical malpractice law, from the falsehoods about defensive medicine to the [...]

[Updated September 2, 2017. The Journal of the American Medical Association - Surgery published an article on this very subject, [...]