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

Since we have been practicing injury law in D.C, Maryland and Virginia, we have had more than a few cases where somebody got hurt due to somebody losing their cool behind the wheel. The media takes the more dramatic examples of these cases and calls them “road rage,” but actually, a lot of these cases stem from something minor. A driver is behind another car that isn’t going fast enough. Someone doesn’t go immediately after the light turns green. A driver thinks, “Oh, you cut me off? Well, let’s see if you like it when I cut you off!”

It is very easy to think of your car as not being connected to the real world, especially nowadays. What with cruise control, immaculate suspension, anti-lock brakes, windows that filter out practically all outside noise, GPS devices, iPods, television screens and satellite radio, it is quite easy to forget that you are travelling at a high rate of speed in a vehicle that can weigh anywhere from 2500 pound to a half ton. If everything about your car is easy and convenient, it isn’t that much of a stretch for you to imagine that the world outside of your car should be that way too. But the real world is very rarely easy and convenient.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, aggressive driving leads to deaths in all 50 states every year. Of the 6,800,000 crashes that occur every year, a “substantial number” are believed to be caused by aggressive and angry driving. So if you happen to be in a situation on the road where your patience is being tested, try to imagine what your life would be like if you decide to make up for lost time and get somebody hurt, or worse. Or if you decided that you have had about enough of that person driving slowly in front of you and did something to cause an accident? Believe us; we have represented enough car accident injury victims to tell you that aggressive driving is not worth it.

Greenberg and Bederman is a car accident injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We have offered legal assistance to those in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. who have been hurt in car crashes due to no fault of their own. If you or a loved one has been injured due to the aggressive or negligent actions of another driver, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

While the FDA dithered and failed to use its new powers, literally millions of people were still being prescribed propoxyphene based drugs. This makes the case of Kira Nicole Gilbert particularly tragic. Ms. Gilbert was a 22 year old Cincinnati-area woman who injured her knee while working at an orphanage in April of 2009. Her doctor prescribed her Darvocet for the pain. Eight days later she was found dead in her apartment. The autopsy ruled that cause of death was acute cardiac failure combined with pulmonary edema, which is a medical term for a buildup of fluid in the lungs. Ms. Gilbert was the picture of perfect health prior to her knee injury, and while the pharmaceutical company would be hard pressed to find some other cause for her death, we imagine that won’t stop them from trying.

Ms. Gilbert’s death happened long after the Food and Drug Administration suspected that there was something wrong with propoxyphene, and long after the FDA had the power to move faster to remove dangerous drugs from the shelves of American pharmacies and hospitals. Such behavior is practically expected of pharmaceutical companies, who will go to very great lengths to keep their products on the shelves regardless of the dangers to the people who use them. But regulatory agencies are meant to protect the general public from harm. In the case of Darvon and Darvocet, the FDA acted too late.

When the FDA finally removed these drugs from the shelves, they concluded that Darvon, Darvocet and other propoxyphene-based drugs can cause significant changes in the electrical activity of the heart, even when it is used in small therapeutic doses. This alteration of electrical activity can cause heart palpitations, irregular heartbeats and episodes of cardiac arrest.

Greenberg and Bederman is currently offering legal assistance to people in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. who have been injured and hospitalized due to the use of painkillers containing propoxyphene. We are also offering help to the families of people who have lost their lives due to the use of Darvon and Darvocet. If you or a loved one has suffered from a heart attack, heart palpitations, pulmonary edema or other health complications after taking Darvon or Darvocet, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free drug injury legal consultation.

Cincinnati Bengals receiver Chris Henry suffered from a chronic brain injury that may have influenced his mental state and behavior before he died last winter, West Virginia University researchers said Monday.

The doctors had done a microscopic tissue analysis of Henry's brain that showed he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is caused by repeated hits to the head. It is a disease that essentially causes the brain to deteriorate, and as it progresses there are multiple symptoms that can affect the victim. Among these are dementia, irrational and violent behavior, memory loss and a lack of impulse control. As a receiver in the National Football League, Chris Henry would have spent the majority of the years of his life playing football. There was probably no shortage of incidents where he received major blows to the head. So all of a sudden, it becomes clear that Mr. Henry wasn’t necessarily “wild” and “immature,” but was instead sick, and his accident becomes that much more of a tragedy. It also raises a very troubling question. Why didn’t it occur to anyone in the NFL, or the Cincinnati Bengals or in Mr. Henry’s immediate circle that his behavior wasn’t natural? Why didn’t anyone recommend that he see a neurologist, or at the very least a therapist?

The story of Chris Henry underscores two things: First, it emphasizes how brain injuries can drastically alter the behavior of the victim. Secondly, it emphasizes how brain injury victims can go for years without being properly diagnosed.

The human brain is the most complex organ in the body. Modern medicine and modern science is still trying to figure out all the ways in which it works, or how one part of the brain connects to another, or how they all balance out and work together. When a part of the brain is damaged even slightly, the repercussions for the victim in terms of movement, the senses or emotional stability can be enormous.

For instance, what happens if you are an elementary school teacher who all of a sudden loses her ability to control her temper? What happens if you are an air traffic controller who all of a sudden loses his ability to remember the order of things? How are you supposed to continue on in your career? How are you supposed to earn a living? How are you supposed to live a normal life?

For that matter, how are you supposed to even know if you have a brain injury? It obviously never occurred to Mr. Henry that he had one, even as he was getting arrested, flying into rages, or, tragically, jumping on to the back of a moving truck.

If you have been in any kind of accident where you received a blow to the head, no matter how minor it might have seemed, it is crucial that you tell your doctor. Something as simple as an x-ray could be the difference between a proper diagnosis and having your entire life fall into ruin because of an undiagnosed brain injury.

Greenberg and Bederman is an injury law firm based in Washington, D.C. Many of our clients are people who have suffered brain injuries in car accidents or due to falls. We understand the difficulties that traumatic brain injuries can cause people, and we also understand the difficulties in getting insurance companies to recognize those difficulties. Insurance companies have an unfortunate tendency to automatically assume that people who suffer from behavioral or other mental difficulties after an accident are just a number, the lowest number, they can try to pay out an injury claim on. We take pride in our ability to help our clients fight through the obstructionism of insurance companies and get the compensation that they deserve. If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident and is suffering from the effects of a brain injury,  contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free brain injury legal consultation.

• You have an injury or illness that prevents you from doing the work that you used to do. In other words, if you used to have a job that required heavy physical labor and you severely injure yourself in a car accident, it is unlikely that you will be able to continue to work at your same job.
•  You can’t do other work because of your condition. Making a career change happens to many people at some point in their lives, but with severe injuries or debilitating illnesses a career switch simply isn’t an option. If you have an injury where simply sitting upright causes you pain, there aren’t many employment positions available.
•  Your disability is expected to last at least a year or to result in your death. It is important to realize that SSDI is generally for people who have been severely injured or are severely ill. Injuries that result in permanent impairment or injuries that will take extensive and lengthy recovery periods are generally the types that are considered for SSDI benefits.

If your condition meets these general criteria, then it falls to the Social Security Administration to determine whether or not you are actually disabled. They do this by asking five questions.

1.       Are you currently working? The idea here is that you can’t really be considered disabled if you are holding down a job and earning more than $1000 a month.  If you are currently working and making more than that, then as far as the SSA is concerned, you aren’t disabled.

2.       Is your condition Severe? In other words, does your condition directly affect your ability to work? Can you not work specifically because of your injury or illness?

3.       Is your condition on the list of disabling conditions? The Social Security Administration has a list of conditions which will automatically qualify you for SSDI. You can find that list here. If your condition is not on the automatically disabling list, that doesn’t mean you should give up. It just means that they take a longer time considering whether or not you will qualify.

4.       Can you go back to your old job or go back to similar work? If you get into a car accident, but are still able to do the job that you had before you were injured, then you will not qualify for SSDI. This has become more and more common in recent years, as a great deal of the work is more automated and less based on manual labor.

5.       Can you do any other type of work? The key here is that they want disabled to mean “severely disabled.” If your injury has you completely bed-ridden or has left you with brain injuries, then there is a high amount of probability that you would not be able to transfer your skills over to any other job, or really do any other job for that matter.

These are the basic qualifications for Social Security Disability benefits, but what has not been mentioned so far is that the process for applying for these benefits can be very long and quite complicated. There are rejections and appeals, many of which are decided by a presiding administrative law judge. This is not like waiting in line at the DMV to get a driver’s license. It’s more complicated than that.

This is why having experienced legal representation to assist you with your application is so important. It could be the difference between being provided with crucially needed income for you and your family and being left with nothing at all. With serious injuries, or a questionable disability problem, such as mental illness, the stakes are too high to attempt to do without legal counsel.

 Greenberg &  Bederman is a D.C. based law firm that helps injury victims get through the injury process, and that includes helping them with the applications forSocial Security Disability benefits. We serve clients in Silver Spring, Maryland and Baltimore, and have helped hundreds of people all over Maryland, Virginia and Washington, DC. If you or a loved one needs assistance in getting through the SSDI process, contact our social security lawyer Audrey Randall, for a free social security legal consultation.

Avandia works by making the cells more sensitive and responsive to insulin, which reduces the body’s need for the stringent blood sugar monitoring that diabetic patients require. If it works like it is supposed to, it allows diabetes patients to live their lives without going through the constant testing and monitoring that takes up so much of their time. But you have to think that if people had to choose between less blood testing and a massive heart attack, they would be willing to accept the inconvenience of the testing.

As important as the FDA’s actions are, they didn’t exactly come as a surprise to anyone. A 2007 study in the New England Journal of Medicine had already suggested that users of Avandia had an increased risk (by as much as 43%) of heart failure as opposed to diabetics who were treating their condition with regular insulin. And the FDA has further issued a so-called “black box warning label” for the medication, which is a way for the FDA to let the general public know that there are some real concerns about the medication that patients are about to take.

GlaxoSmithKline, who designed, manufacture and market the drug, went into full damage control mode, which meant an onslaught of press releases, as well as “rejecting the conclusions” of the New England Journal of Medicine, the FDA, and anyone with any teeth who had anything negative to say about their type 2 diabetes drug. To give you an idea of GSK’s overall game plan (as well as give you an idea as to how nervous this drug was making people, all you have to do is look at the titles of the numerous press releases that they put out in the wake of all of these negative studies:

o    24 Feb 2010: GlaxoSmithKline responds to US Senate Committee on Finance report on Avandia

o    20 Feb 2010 - GSK rejects conclusions of Senate Committee on Finance Staff Report on Avandia

o    20 Feb 2010 - GSK rejects conclusions reported in The New York Times story on Avandia

o    6 February 2008 - GlaxoSmithKline responds to findings in ACCORD study

o    3 December 2007 - GSK response to Nature Medicine article on rosiglitazone and bone in mice

o    11 September 2007 - GlaxoSmithKline responds to JAMA articles

o    27 July 2007 - GlaxoSmithKline statement in diabetes care study thiazolidinediones and heart failure: a teleo-analysis

o    5 June 2007 - GSK response to New England Journal of Medicine editorials

o    21 May 2007 - GSK response to NEJM article

o    21 May 2007 - GSK response to US Senate Committee on Finance

In case you aren’t keeping count, that’s ten solid denials of studies and warnings by the official digest of the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, and the Senate Finance Committee.

One thing that GSK seems particularly adept at is refuting any studies that portray Avandia in a negative light and creating a more positive outlook on the side effects of Avandia. As personal injury attorneys who represent product liability injuries, this is certainly something familiar with. Quite often, when we present one expert witness, the attorneys for the defendant will provide two or three expert witnesses claiming the opposite.

Over two hundred studies were sent to the FDA by GSK. These all contradicted any negative reports of Avandia, whether it was articles in medical journals, independent studies, or even editorials in newspapers. Rather than just accept that both the NEJM and the FDA had been buried in an avalanche of contradictory news, the British Medical Journal not only took a look at the data in these positive studies, but also at who was responsible for writing and researching them.

What the BMJ found out was that of these, a full 45% of these studies were done by people who had authors with serious financial conflicts of interest. This means that they were essentially on the payroll of either GSK or other competing pharmaceutical companies, either through research grants or consulting fees. There was more:

“Moreover, in an era of “seemingly ubiquitous” requirements for disclosure of financial interests in medical journals, only 53% of the articles reviewed included a competing interest statement, noted the authors from the Mayo Clinical in Rochester, US.”

“…Of these 90 articles, only 69 (77%) included a statement disclosing the conflict of interest in the article itself, while three of the 21 articles that did not disclose the relationship published a statement declaring no conflicts of interest.”

This is hardly unbiased research. If your next grant or paycheck depends on positive reviews, what are the odds that your reports will be, if not skewed in favor, at least carefully neutral?

This isn’t the first time such conflicts have been brought to light. In the wake of the Vioxx scandal, the New York Times discovered that the FDA’s independent advisory committee (which essentially makes or breaks controversial drugs) was populated with scientists and researchers who had similar conflicts of interest. This is profoundly interesting to us, especially if you take a look at the following press release from GSK:

July 30, 2007 — Philadelphia, PA

GlaxoSmithKline [NYSE: GSK] today welcomed the nearly unanimous recommendation of a US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) advisory committee to support Avandia’s (rosiglitazone maleate) continued availability to patients in the US. The company said it will continue to provide information to the FDA to assist in the Agency’s final decision-making.

Greenberg and Bederman is currently offering free legal consultations to people in the Washington, D.C. area who have been injured and/or hospitalized due to heart complications from taking Avandia.  For a free legal review of your Avandia bad drug injury, please fill out a free legal Avandia form, or call Andrew Bederman at (301) 589-2200 for a free legal consultation.

While there were minor differences in the chemical make up of each of these drugs, they were all marketed as “bisphospenates,” which, in a general sense, meant that they were drugs that were supposed to increase bone density.

Just as with many other drugs, things apparently did not go according to plan. Some of the first noticeable problems occurred when some people who were taking Fosamax began to suffer from what is known as “osteonecrosis of the jaw,” or “bone death.” This is as bad and as painful as it sounds. Most of the Fosamax users who suffered from bone death in the jaw had undergone dental surgery, which means that it is possible that Fosamax could strengthen the bones in the legs, arms, hips and ribs at the expense of the strength of the bones in the jaw.

Or maybe it’s simply bad for both. According to an article in USA Today, two recent studies have shown that women who take these bisphosphonates over a long period risk having the medications stop working, which means that the bones would be just as brittle as they were before the women started taking the pills in the first place. According to the study done by Columbia University:

"In the early treatment period, patients using bisphosphonates experienced improvements in all parameters, including decreased buckling ratio and increased cross-sectional area," Melvin Rosenwasser, an orthopaedic surgeon for Columbia University Medical Center, said in a statement. "However, after four years of use, these trends reversed, revealing an association between prolonged therapies and declining cortical bone structural integrity."

The problem here is that these pills are essentially made to be taken for long periods of time. Osteoporosis is the sort of condition that isn’t cured, but is managed. People who take these pills fully expect to take them for the rest of their lives. If the shelf life of effective treatment with this medication is only a few years, then the makers of these drugs have a responsibility to tell their customers that this is the case.

As of right now the Food and Drug Administration is currently running a safety review of Fosamax, Boniva and other bone building drugs in order to see if there is an increase of femur fractures among people who have been taking the drug over extended periods of time. But thousands of people who have been hurt as the result of using Fosamax for years have already filed lawsuits against Merck and other pharmaceutical companies.

A jury trial in New Jersey will be held on July 12, 2010, and this case is meant to be a “bell-weather trial,” for victims of Fosamax and other bisphosphonates all over the country. Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington, D.C. law firm that is currently offering legal assistance to people who have suffered from osteonecrosis of the jaw or other bone fractures due to the use of Fosamax, Boniva, Actonel, or any of the generic versions of these drugs.

Greenberg and Bederman have offices in Silver Spring, Maryland and Baltimore, and are capable of representing injury victims in the entire Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area. That includes Northern Virginia.

Our attorneys have decades of legal experience, and have helped thousands of injury victims in the D.C. area receive fair compensation for their injuries. If you or a loved one has been injured due to the use of Fosamax or any other bisphosphonate, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free Fosamax legal consultation today.

To learn more about fosamax injury, please see our fosamax page on our website.