A top New York heart surgeon who was doing a mercy-mission operation on an 8-year-old boy in El Salvador had to scrub out in the middle of the procedure so he could donate his own rare-type blood to the patient. 

In the May 11 operation, which had begun 12 hours earlier at Bloom Hospital in San Salvador, the boy’s failing aortic valve was replaced with his pulmonary valve and the pulmonary valve was replaced with an artificial valve.

“The surgery had been going well, everything was working great, but he was bleeding a lot and they didn’t have a lot of the medicines we would use to stop the bleeding,” Weinstein said. “After a while they said they couldn’t give him blood because they were running out and he had a rare type.”

“We realized he might bleed to death, so I asked what blood type he was and they said he was B-negative and I said, “You know, I’m B-negative.”

The biggest shame of the insurance companies’ propaganda is that they have pitted wonderful docs like these against the very good lawyers.  Helping hurt people is what the best of both professions are trying to do.  It is the worst of both professions that hurts everyone.  Capping damages just further harms the people that the good guys are trying to protect. 

The newly public data show the increased cardiovascular risk with Vioxx use likely begins as early as four to six months from starting the drug, and then gets bigger, said Dr. Steven Nissen, a Cleveland Clinic cardiologist who heads a huge international study of painkiller safety.  Despite this new evidence, and despite the claim of Merck, the drug’s maker, that the evidence is not accurate, some of the leading experts state that those who took the drug are at risk for heart problems for hte rest of their lives.Š

President Bush on Monday in a speech to the American Hospital Association  called for limits on medical malpractice lawsuits, despite the fact that Bush’s proposals are written for special interests and would not significantly reduce health care costs. 

Officials at a suburban Denver hospital alerted six brain surgery patients after another patient died of a rare degenerative brain ailment, the hospital said Thursday.  The dead patient is believed to have contracted the deadly ailment from surgical instruments used during his brain  surgery.

Rheumatoid arthritis patients taking Humira or Remicade face triple the risk of developing several kinds of cancer and double the risk of getting serious infections, a study led by the Mayo Clinic found.

The analysis builds on previous reports about the risks associated with Abbott Laboratories’ Humira and Centocor’s Remicade. But the earlier research focused mostly on one kind of cancer — lymphoma — and infections such as tuberculosis and pneumonia.

The new study found an apparent link to other cancers, too, including skin, gastrointestinal, breast and lung tumors. It also quantifies the risks and says high doses appear to be the riskiest.  The study appears in the May 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.  Yet, the makers of the new drugs, Abbott and Centocor, claim that the research is flawed.  However, the researchers analyzed data from nine studies comparing Humira or Remicade with placebos and pooled the results. There were 29 cancers in 3,493 patients who received at least one dose of either drug, compared with three cancers in 1,512 patients on placebos.

The Food and Drug Administration should have the power to require that drug makers conduct studies on the safety of prescription medications already on the market, congressional investigators recommend.

Drug makers often promise timely follow-up studies, but they often delay going ahead, the agency said. As a result, the FDA can lack useful data in determining whether an approved drug really is safe, according to a report being released Monday by the Government Accountability Office.

Investigators also are urging Congress to change how the FDA tracks potential concerns about drug safety, makes major decisions and settles internal disputes, especially between the two offices that now assess drug safety.

More than half of the uninsured adults said they were having problems paying their medical bills, with 20 percent of working adults paying off medical debt —often $2,000 or more, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based private, health care policy foundation.

The study of 4,350 adults also found that people without insurance were more likely to forgo recommended health screenings such as mammograms than those with coverage, and were less likely to have a regular doctor than their insured counterparts.The report paints a bleak health care picture for the uninsured.

“It represents an explosion of the insurance crisis into those with moderate incomes,” said Sara Collins, a senior program officer at the Commonwealth Fund.

BOSTON, May 11 — Frivolous lawsuits are not a major contributor to rising malpractice insurance costs nor does frivolous litigation clog the court system, according to investigators at Harvard School of Public Health and the Harvard Risk Management Foundation.  

An analysis of 1,452 closed malpractice claims indicated that a great majority of  claims that didn’t involve medical error and claims that didn’t involve injuries never recieved any compensation, as reported in the May 11 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the country’s pre-eminent medical journal.

What is even more impressive is that the results of the study were based upon information and statistics provided by the insurance industry, not lawyers or patients.  So, even the insurance industry’s own data, supplied to leading doctors, conclusively demonstrates that placing limits on damage compensation would not change doctor’s insurance premiums.

The just-released study of the Congressional Budget Office, after studying the potential effect of numerous reforms of the justice system, concluded that, even if doctors’ malpractice premiums are reduced by placing caps on malpractice damages, there will be a total savings on your health care expenses of less than  one-half of one percent.  Malpractice awards are not causing any crisis.

The May 1 issue of Time magazine has the cover story about doctors who are afraid of being patients in hospitals, because they are aware of the serious risks of errors in the healthcare system.  The article is well-written, factual, and will make any patient shudder at the thought of the things that can go wrong in their care.  The justice system is the friend of last resort for those harmed.