Maryland Injury and Disability Law : Washington DC Metro Injury & Disability Lawyer & Attorney : Greenberg & Bederman : Accidents, Falls, Medical Malpractice : Maryland, DC, Virginia

We have spent the past month or so taking the Bayer Corporation to task over their line of birth control pills, which go under the names Yaz, Yasmin and Oscella. We have been doing this for quite a few reasons, chief among them the fact that they have decided to use an ingredient called drospirenone that creates dangerous side effects. This synthetic variant of progestin has been shown to increase the likelihood of blood clots not just in women who smoke or women over thirty five, but in any woman who uses the pill at all. The damage from these adverse side effects  of this “new and improved” ingredient has been substantial. Hundreds of women have reported serious bad side effects and complications after taking this pill, ranging from strokes and heart attacks to pulmonary embolisms, and the FDA has received over fifty reports of deaths.

A product which establishes a casualty list is bad enough, but what we find equally bad about this whole scenario is that the advertising campaigns that were used to promote Yaz in particular were misleading. They understated the increased dangerous side effects of the pill while promoting supposed secondary benefits of the pill, which, as it turns out, weren’t all that effective in the first place. All of this served to get more and more women to buy a pill under misleading circumstances, which meant that more and more women were in danger.

In all fairness, nearly all birth control pills carry some risk of blood clots and other dangerous side effects. All of the makers and manufacturers of birth control pills are well aware of this. But with other birth control pills, the amount of incidents where blood clots occur are quite small, with the number remaining around 1%. And even with that number, the vast majority of manufacturers of birth control pills advertise their products responsibly. They tell you what the pill does, does not do, and, most importantly, they tell you what the risks and serious side effects are.

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Let’s say for the sake of argument that we decided to get into the car wax business. Let us further say that we spent millions of dollars on an advertising campaign in which we claimed that not only would our wax make your car extremely shiny, but would also make it run better.

If we ran ads making this claim in newspapers, on television, the radio and the internet, we would be in serious trouble, regardless of the accuracy of our claims about the ability of our wax to make cars shine. The sticking point is that we claimed that our car wax can do something which it most certainly cannot, which is improving the function of your cars motor.

No reputable business would market a product by claiming that it does something it wouldn’t do, yet many pharmaceutical companies seem to have no problems doing exactly that. Just this past year, Bayer has been cited for misleading advertising by the Food and Drug Administration, which forced the pharmaceutical giant to spend even more money to adjust its marketing campaign.

The advertising in question involved a birth control pill called Yaz, which was marketed as not only a contraceptive but as a cure for both acne and premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD. You shouldn’t confuse  PMDD with premenstrual syndrome (PMS,) as the symptoms of PMS are much less severe then the symptoms of PMDD. PMS brings with it mild mood swings, irritability and cramps, while PMDD is associated with severe depression, panic attacks and insomnia, among other symptoms. One of the many problems that the FDA had with the Yaz advertising campaign was that Bayer actually did mistaken the symptoms for PMS with PMDD in order to increase the appeal of the drug.

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There are two major principles at work in any medical facility. The first is the Hippocratic Oath, which is basically an affirmation of what practicing medicine is supposed to be about. It includes statements like:

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

Despite having to battle through the economic realities of modern medicine in America, where the insurance companies wield influence in equal measure with the doctors, most medical professionals do their best to abide by this oath.

But the second major principle at work in most hospitals is Murphy’s Law, which states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And the number of medical or surgical errors that take place in this country every year seems to back that up.

The Institute of Medicine released a landmark report back in 1999, in which it was claimed that as many as 98,000 people per year die due to preventable medical errors.  Even with that report having been written a decade ago, both the numbers of errors and practices that lead to them have remained quite solidly in place. In 2008, The Washington Postreported that within a two year period, medical errors led to 238,337 preventable medical errors, and that was only among Medicare recipients. 

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Doctors and nurses do not have x-ray vision. They can’t tell exactly what is wrong with you simply by looking.

What they do have at their disposal is the next best thing: actual X-ray machines, MRI’s, CAT-scans, and years of intensive training, during which they are taught to recognize telltale symptoms of illnesses and conditions in their patients.

But none of these will do a patient any good whatsoever if the doctor can’t be bothered to getting around to seeing them.

Death or permanent injury due to unnecessary delay of proper treatment can be medical malpractice, or also known as medical negligence. The idea that someone died or is condemned to spend the rest of his or her life with a severe and debilitating condition when they didn’t have to does not sit well with us, and it shouldn’t sit well with you either.

A delay in treatment occurs when a doctor or hospital does not treat a sick or injured person in a timely manner that is consistent with his or her injuries. Quite often, delays are the result of a failure to complete a necessary test, such as an X-ray or CAT scan, or it is a failure to initiate these tests at all. There have also been occasions where doctors or nurses misdiagnose symptoms and work under the assumption that the patient is suffering from a malady that isn’t dangerous or life-threatening. (We have a recent medical malpractice case under these circumstances. In this case, a young intern formed the correct diagnoses quickly, but because she was young and inexperienced, no one would listen to her. This refusal to investigate caused our client to be paralyzed).

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Tort Reform - Loser Pays

Since President Obama began moving forward on health care, there have been several attempts to either stop or dilute his ideas on health care reform to the point where they will be completely ineffective if they are put into practice. Some of the ideas that have been put forward are geared towards removing “restrictions” that are apparently removing any incentives for insurance companies to lower their rates. Among these ideas are removing the restrictions that force people to buy insurance only in the state in which they are living, which would (in theory) keep insurance rates low by allowing people to hunt for the lowest prices.

Another idea that has been a prominent part of the Republican platform is that of “tort reform,” or, putting limitations on the rights of Americans to have their grievances decided in a court or law:

“Ending junk lawsuits: The GOP plan would help end costly junk lawsuits and curb defensive medicine by enacting medical liability reforms modeled after the successful state laws of California and Texas.”

We’ve actually seen how liability reforms in Texas have worked, and to call these new laws “successful” is a stretch. All these caps have done in Texas is made it financially impossible for many medical malpractice injury victims to bring their cases to court. And they have also done comparatively little to lower medical malpractice insurance rates, which is what the supposed purpose of these laws was in the first place.

It has been our experience that most “tort reform” initiatives don’t do much except price victims out of the courtroom, and the new proposal by Senators Saxby Chambliss and Lindsay Graham is a perfect example of that premise.

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 Birth Injury Lawyer

A few years ago, former talk show host Ricki Lake released a surprisingly good and informative documentary called The Business of Being Born. The premise of the film was that pregnant women in the United States are put through what is essentially an assembly line process when it comes to giving birth. Profit driven hospitals give drugs that induce contractions and encourage women to get caesarean sections at the slightest provocation, and they do this simply because of the speed and convenience of it. What matters to these hospitals is not necessarily what is best for the health of the mother and the infant, but rather the amount of women they can get in and out as quickly as possible.

Ms. Lake brings up some very good points. If the birthing procedure is now riddled with chemically induced shortcuts and uses surgical delivery as an easy way out, it is not much of a surprise that the United States has the second worst newborn death rate in the developed world.

You can also consider that since the emphasis is placed on getting women in and out quickly rather than safely, the amount of birth injuries that take place in America shouldn’t come as much of a shock either. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, there are 6.68 birth trauma incidents per 1,000 live births. That includes injuries to the shoulders, chest, arms, lungs and head, any of which could seriously harm the development of the newborn child and could cause a permanent injury, such as erbs palsy, or brachial plexus.

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Yaz, Yasmin, Ocella and Gallbladder Injury

Over the past few months we have been staying on top of the news about Bayer’s line of birth control pills. As many of you probably know, there have been serious medical problems that have been surfacing among women who have used Yaz, Yasmin, and Oscella, which is the generic version of Yasmin.

Women all over the country have been suffering from strokes, pulmonary embolisms and heart attacks, which are being caused by blood clots that generally form in the legs of users of these pills. The cause of these clots is due to elevated levels of potassium in the bloodstream, which falls firmly at the feet of one of the two main ingredients of Bayer’s line of birth control pills. Rather than use the standard ingredient of progestin, Bayer decided to go with Drispirenone, which is a synthetic variation of progestin that was shown to be effective in fighting acne and the mood swings that sometimes come with PMS.

We believe that Bayer was well aware of the increased dangers of drispirenone, but chose to downplay them in advertisements, labeling and the information that was given to doctors.

We also believe that Yaz, Yasmin and Oscella are causing gall bladder disease in the women who use them. In addition to raised potassium levels in the blood stream of users of these pills, it has also been show to increase the level of cholesterol in bile, which the gallbladder is primarily concerned with storing. Once the cholesterol level goes up, the gallbladder’s storage abilities are slowed down, which can and often does lead to gallstones.

Gallstones might not seem to be a serious medical problem, but anyone who has suffered the severe pain that accompanies them could certainly tell you otherwise. There is also the very real danger that a gallstone might get caught in a bile duct, which can cause the bile to stop being produced. The only remedy for this is painful and expensive surgery in which the gallbladder is removed.

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