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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (366913)	1/15/2008 8:10:42 AM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571076

In the vast majority of cases, cerebral palsy is not caused by poor handling of the fetus by a health care provider: "The theory that doctor error is a common cause of CP was dubious when Mr. Edwards used it to win his cases, from the 1980s to the mid-1990s, and is universally rejected by experts today. . . . What is more, attacks on alleged negligence in the maternity ward may actually have hurt the quality of patient care. Many CP lawsuits, including one that Mr. Edwards describes in his book, turned on the theory that doctors could have prevented CP by ordering a cesarian section. " pointoflaw.com "On Jan. 31, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, along with the American Academy of Pediatrics, released the results of a comprehensive new three-year study surveying what is known about the causes of cerebral palsy and brain injury in full and near-full term infants. According to the study, "the vast majority" of brain damage and cerebral palsy among these infants originates in factors largely or completely outside the control of delivery-room personnel.. .......... In part because lawsuits blaming OBs for cerebral palsy and other infant brain damage may constitute the single biggest branch of medical malpractice litigation, yielding lawyers the highest settlements and the richest contingency fees, rivaled only by failure to diagnose cancer. If ACOG's report is to be credited, much of this litigation looks to be scientifically unfounded. Around 8,000 babies are diagnosed each year with cerebral palsy, an incurable disorder that in severe cases may require a lifetime of care. The distraught parent who turns to the Internet for information after a child's diagnosis will be bombarded with law-firm ads. "Delivery mistakes can cause cerebral palsy. Record-setting cerebral palsy verdicts!" blares one. Another boasts of $120 million, $103 million and $100 million awards won by "our affiliated attorneys (these are the very same attorneys that could be assigned to your case)." At CPalsy.com, until recently a picture of a wheelchair flashed in alternation with a picture of a stack of dollar bills. "Your child's cerebral palsy may be the result of a medical mistake. Don't get mad. Get Even!" These sites offer an ostensibly independent medical evaluation of a child's file, which, however, is not necessarily independent of the lawyers' incentive to find someone to blame. Among many in the litigation business, it is an article of faith that mistakes in labor and delivery causing hypoxia, or lack of oxygen, are a very frequent cause of infants' bad neurological outcomes. The next step is to break the horrible news to the parent: Your child would never have had to endure this grievous disability had the doctors only done their job properly. One father was recently quoted as saying that on hearing this news he was gripped with a desire to kill the doctor, probably not an unusual reaction. The lawsuit that follows will claim that brain damage could have been averted had doctors only given the mother a Caesarean section, or given her one earlier or later; or administered medications in a different combination, or at a higher or lower dosage -- there's an ample supply both of causation theories and of experts-for-hire willing to testify to them. Hired experts for the doctor and hospital then often dispute the causal link between the alleged lapse in care and the child's plight. ........... It estimates that between 6% and 10% of newborns' brain injuries do originate in events during labor and delivery, and that of these perhaps half, amounting to 3% to 5%, might be preventable (which does not mean that the failure to prevent them implies negligent care in any given case). In a larger swath of cases, perhaps another 25%, the handling of labor and delivery may influence the extent of damage in cases where pre-existing risk factors already spell trouble for a child. The report does not dispute that some high-verdict obstetric brain damage cases rest on valid science. .... manhattan-institute.org "A two-volume report from the Institute of Medicine, entitled Medical Professional Liability and the Delivery of Obstetrical Care, in the course of exploring its subject, built a substantial case that many obstetricians were being wrongly sued. It appeared in 1989. In his widely reviewed book Galileo's Revenge, which was and remains the leading popular work assailing "junk science", my Manhattan Institute colleague Peter Huber accords a central role (and a full chapter) to cases charging obstetricians with causing cerebral palsy. Huber's language in discussing those cases is far more caustically negative than mine. Galileo's Revenge appeared in 1991. It's true that important additional studies have been done in the years since then, which have helped confirm and extend the consensus view reflected in last January's ACOG/AAP study (whose findings, it should be noted, have been endorsed by the federal government's National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as numerous other authorities). " overlawyered.com