Central New York Injury Lawyer Blog

Yet another article about medical malpractice appeared in my favorite newspaper yesterday. The New York Times reports, in an article titled, “When Surgeons Leave Objects Behind” that surgeons in the U.S. leave an estimated 4,000 “surgical items” inside their patients every year, the vast majority of which are surgical sponges used to soak up blood during the surgery. Clamps, scalpels, and even scissors are sometimes left inside, but two-thirds of the “forgotten” items are surgical sponges. Too often one or more of them end up on the wrong side of the stitches once the patient is sewn up. These can cause all kinds of complications and infections later on.

Leaving sponges inside the patient seems pretty lame. How can they make such a major screw up so often?

First, the sponges are pretty small (see the photo above), and lots of them go into a patient during surgery. In abdominal operations, for example, doctors often stuff dozens of them inside a patient to absorb blood. And many surgical teams (usually nurses) keep only a manual count of the sponges that go into a patient, and then recount the ones taken out to make sure the numbers match. But in a busy, long operation, people sometimes forget how many went in, or else miscount.

I get calls and emails almost every week from medical malpractice victims, yes, truly malpracticed patients, yet I turn most of them down. Why? It kills me to explain this to them, but the truth is that often the harm they suffered is not worth the cost of bringing a medical malpractice lawsuit in New York.

Yes, medical malpractice lawsuits, at least in New York, are extremely expensive because getting a doctor to testify against another doctor (and you need that to win) is so costly.

Even though we turn away four out of five medical malpractice cases, because the harm is not large enough, the malpractice suits we do bring help make medicine safer by providing error-prone doctors and others with a wake-up call, a “sting”, when their sloppy practice causes major harm. But I often worry about the many, many mistakes that, through good fortune, cause only minor harm, and thus provide no “sting”. Doctors, nurses, hospitals and other medical providers can easily “blow off” these errors. There should be some “sting” in the smaller injury cases, too.

Dr. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins School of Medicine cancer surgeon and researcher, was interviewed online about his new book titled, “Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care”. The title tells it like it is. Here are some key quotes from his interview:

• Hospitals across the nation have “alarmingly high error rates”.

• “1 in 4 hospital patients are harmed by a mistake”