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

People all over the world are preparing for New Years Eve celebrations. Folks are getting ready for parties and balls, bars and restaurants are hiring more wait staff and bartenders, and parents are hiring baby sitters to look after their kids for the evening. If anything, New Years Eve does bring a minor economic shot in the arm.

There are another few groups of people preparing for New Years Eve. That would be the police and the hospitals.

San Francisco Chronicle, 12/27/11:  Bay Area doctors and emergency workers are bracing for what's likely to be the busiest weekend of the year.

New Year's Eve is typically loaded with alcohol-fueled deaths and injuries, and the coming celebration will probably be worse than most years because it falls on a Saturday, giving revelers a full day of partying and, presumably, a full day of recovery.

Eureka Times Standard, 12/27/2011:Fortuna police officers will participate in a DUI saturation patrol Saturday and will arrest anyone caught driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

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We’ve had a lot of problems with the D.C. subway system over the years. With the broken and sometimes collapsing escalators, the poor security, the indifferent staff and its malfunctioning and antiquated track safety system, there isn’t much about the Metro that bolsters our confidence.

People have been hurt, and some have even been killed. This isn’t what people should expect out of their public transportation system. While we understand that it takes time and money to fix these problems, and that money is particularly scarce these days, we believe that the Metro needs a complete safety overhaul, and it needs one quickly.

“Metro officials said Wednesday a friction ring came off a Blue Line train because of a “potential hub failure” in Tuesday’s incident that shut down service along two major rail lines for hours.

The transit agency has pulled 16 rail cars from service as part of its investigation. Those rail cars have 34 hubs that are the same as the one involved in Tuesday’s incident.” – Washington Post, 12/21/2011

If you aren’t sure what the friction ring is, it is a very important part of the braking system. It came off of a Blue Line train that was on the way to the Smithsonian station. The ring flew backwards into the tunnel and lodged itself between the right hand rail and the third electrical rail. Shortly afterwards, an Orange line train heading towards Vienna ran over the obstruction, which damaged that train.

It goes without saying that there were multiple failures here. The first was the failure of the friction ring. The second was the failure of the operator of the Blue Line train to warn the Orange Line train of the possible obstruction.

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 Everything breaks down eventually. Anyone who owns a car or a bike or a refrigerator or a television or a home can personally testify to this universal truth. This also applies to the human body. There isn’t one person living on the planet that has never gotten sick or injured themselves.

Nowadays, we are much more fortunate than we were a few decades ago. Technological advancements have given us the chance to replace many body parts that are either broken or are in the process of breaking down. There are cochlear implants for the hearing impaired, there are prosthetic limbs for people who have lost theirs, and there are artificial valves and pacemakers that keep a heart beating. If you consider what the alternatives used to be, we have many reasons to be thankful that we are living in 2011 and not 1911.

While these advancements are certainly good things, none of us can pretend that these new parts are perfect. For one thing, a victim of an IED is probably glad that he is able to walk on his own again, but we suspect that he would rather have not lost his leg at all. And another aspect is that the principle that “everything breaks down eventually” still very much applies to these new replacement parts. But the problem we are having with a particular brand of hip replacements is not that they are breaking down due to the normal wear and tear, but because they were defective.

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One of the more popular arguments among those who wish to either severely curtail or entirely eliminate the rights of patients is that if the states make it difficult for injured patients to sue doctors who make mistakes, then ultimately the quality of care will go up. This argument is made with particular fire when it comes to emergency medicine.

We can certainly understand how emergency medicine became the focal point. Emergency rooms are where serious cases are brought in, and the environment is usually chaotic. It can be difficult for emergency room physicians to make the right decision every time. But it is our contention that all medicine can be stressful and chaotic, and the fact that a medical professional is working in an emergency room or facility does not absolve this person of any responsibility when they make preventable errors.

Yet in Texas, emergency room workers are given immunity in all but name when it comes to liability for any mistakes that they might make. In order for someone who has been injured due to an emergency room mistake to be able to claim any damages in court, it must be proven that the emergency room worker meant to harm the patient. Since the odds are slim to none that any emergency room worker would admit to doing so, victims of emergency room medical malpractice in Texas now have no real recourse for malpractice injuries.

So if the argument that “less liability = more and better care” holds up, then Texas should be a prime example of high quality emergency care, right? For that matter, any state that has caps on damages and restrictions on how patients can sue doctors should have better emergency care facilities than states which have no restrictions, right?

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Skin burns are probably one of the most painful of injuries. Everything about it, from the actual injury to the healing to the recuperation, brings with it severe pain. Many burns heal, but they don’t really “heal.” The scar tissue lasts for a very long time.

The burn specialists at University of Southern California Hospital are quite familiar with them. It’s what they do on a daily basis. They know how to treat them, how to keep them clean, and, most importantly, they know how they are caused. And in a recent program on NPR, they made it perfectly clear what is causing at least two or three severe burn cases a week in their hospital. It isn’t gasoline, or cigarettes, or kids playing with matches. What causes two to three severe burn cases a week at this hospital is lunch. Specifically, it’s those little Styrofoam cups of instant soup where you pour in boiling water and then wait for a few minutes.

Cups of Noodles (and all of the other equivalents on the market) are absolutely dangerous. For one thing, they trap heat longer due to the Styrofoam, and the noodles are also very effective conductors of heat. In other words, you can expect an instant soup cup to remain hot for much longer than say, a cup of tea or coffee.

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