The Lawrence Firm Blog

For people who are ill, the sound of silence can be a healing absence of distracting noise. Unfortunately, as anyone who has been hospitalized in Covington or Cincinnati can tell you, hospitals are anything but quiet. As hospital administrators, doctors, and others try to find ways to reduce the risk of medical malpractice, they are looking more carefully at factors such as noise that can be detrimental to healing. A

Some readers of our Covington medical malpractice blog will recall a post we published back in October on an Indiana cardiologist. The New York Times had run a thought-provoking investigative piece on a doctor who retired in 2014, leaving behind hundreds of angry and injured former patients. A more recent article in a legal journal gave us more details on the disturbing allegations against the heart doctor. Nearly 300 people

It’s a little over an hour’s drive north from Covington to find the suburban home of a retired Air Force colonel who is waiting to hear the Ohio Supreme Court rule on his medical malpractice case. The high court won’t be deciding whether or not the former colonel and airline pilot was harmed by a negligent surgeon, but whether or not he waited too long to file his claim against

It’s standard for doctors to tell patients of the effects of prescribed or administered drugs. But what happens when a physician fails to live up to that standard and neglects to tell a patient that a powerful medication can make it unsafe to drive? A Kentucky newspaper reports that in one case far from Covington, a state’s highest court has ruled that a medical malpractice lawsuit against a doctor and

It’s the thing everyone dreaded in school: the pop quiz. The good folks at PopTorts.com recently unveiled a new quiz on medical malpractice, so we thought we would help you relive memories of childhood while hopefully broadening your understanding of this complex area of law, all at the same time. The first question is straightforward: What percentage of new tort cases are medical malpractice cases? Is it: A. more than

He was a trusted doctor for decades in a town not much smaller than Covington. People listened carefully when the cardiologist spoke and they followed his recommendations. When the Munster, Indiana, physician advised them to take medication, they took it. When the heart specialist said someone needed stents inserted, that’s what happened. And when he told folks that they needed open heart surgery, their chests were split open so that

Covington residents who missed a recent report from Cincinnati’s WCPO will be interested in the latest developments in the case of the spine doctor who performed unnecessary operations. The hospital where he performed a number of medically unneeded spine surgeries has agreed to pay $4.1 million to Medicare and Medicaid. Dr. Abubakar Atiq Durrani performed lumbar, thoracic, and cervical surgeries at West Chester Hospital during a three-year period ending in

When a person prevails in a medical malpractice lawsuit, there are a number of emotions that they can experience, including relief that justice was done and that they will receive compensation for things such as past and future medical bills. Sometimes a person who prevails feels vindication knowing they have proven to a court that they were harmed by a negligent Covington doctor or Kentucky hospital. In other cases, however,

Virtually everyone carries a smartphone, which means everyone also carries with them a camera and audio recorder. We can see the power of these media tools on the news virtually every day, as fires, crimes, car accidents, arrests and more are captured on phones and then shared with the world. The health care industry is aware of the rapid rise of personal media, too. A recent article in Medical Economics

Covington is in the heart of basketball country, but we know many of our readers also love college and pro football. Readers of a certain age might recall Elbert L. “Ickey” Woods, who played every game of his pro career with the Cincinnati Bengals. Woods and his playful “Ickey Shuffle” TD dance were fan favorites back in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Woods played college ball out west at

His track record as a neurosurgeon is allegedly one of causing pain rather than alleviating it, harming rather than helping, and leaving patients worse off than when they came to see him. Though Dr. Christopher Duntsch has not yet become a topic of national interest, some of our Covington readers might recall the story of the Texas physician gaining notoriety as the so-called “sociopath surgeon” or “Dr. Death.” We touched

Everyone makes mistakes, including doctors. Most of their errors are relatively minor and cause little or no harm. However, there are cases of negligence, too, in which the doctors and nurses make mistakes that live on in infamy. In one case, a baby was brought to a hospital emergency room. After her initial assessment, she waited for nearly five hours before she was seen by a doctor. The wait allowed