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Nov 23, 2024 | 
kevinmd.com | Howard Smith |Nicholas Bellacicco |Christine Zharova |Oscar Chen
Fundamental in a medical malpractice lawsuit is determining whether an unfortunate outcome is an error of nature or a medical error. An error of nature results from a medical intervention that aligns with the standard of care. A medical error, on the other hand, results from a medical intervention that departs from the standard of care. The problem in medical malpractice is that errors of nature can be random occurrences even when a medical intervention complies with the standard of care.
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Oct 30, 2024 | 
kevinmd.com | Michelle Ikoma |Scott Landman |Nicholas Bellacicco |Jacob Riegler
The fourth-year medical student “Megan” urgently wanted to meet with me. She just returned from an away rotation in pathology in mid-August and wanted to talk. She was not her usual confident self, appearing distracted and pale. She shared that she had thoroughly enjoyed her rotation and had found it stimulating and the faculty inspiring. One of her responsibilities had been to meet with patients who had enrolled in a multi-year longitudinal study, which required regular, periodic blood samples.
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Sep 13, 2024 | 
kevinmd.com | Howard Smith |Christine Zharova |Nicholas Bellacicco |Shah-Naz Khan
If you are embroiled in a medical malpractice lawsuit today, you are in a difficult situation. Your lawsuit is one of 85,000 medical malpractice cases filed each year. Regardless of what your defense counsel tells you about merit, no one truly knows how many lawsuits have merit. A prominent defense attorney has gone on record declaring that there is no such thing as a frivolous lawsuit and publicly disavows any notion to the contrary. As strange as this seems, it comes from a defense attorney.
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Sep 9, 2024 | 
kevinmd.com | Arthur Lazarus |Nicholas Bellacicco |James Stewart |Oscar Chen
An excerpt from Story Treasures: Medical Essays and Insights in the Narrative Tradition. The Gish gallop – named after American creationist Duane Gish, who challenged the science of evolution – is a rhetorical technique often used by a debater to throw out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them (think: Donald Trump).
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Aug 30, 2024 | 
kevinmd.com | Ariel Brown |Michelle Ikoma |Scott Landman |Nicholas Bellacicco
It’s one thing to choose a career dedicated to saving lives; it’s another altogether to confront the harsh reality of death. As a third-year medical student, my trauma surgery rotation highlighted that distinction. For all the patients we saved, there were also those who, despite the team’s best efforts, succumbed to their injuries amidst trauma activations.
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Aug 25, 2024 | 
kevinmd.com | Natalie LaBossier |Michelle Ikoma |Scott Landman |Nicholas Bellacicco
Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!We sit down with Ellie Qian, a medical student, to discuss the profound experiences that shape the journey of becoming a compassionate health care professional. Ellie shares a transformative encounter from her first year in medical school, where she practiced medical interviewing with a standardized patient, Chris, who has stage 4 metastatic lung cancer, and his supportive partner, Jordan.
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Jul 4, 2024 | 
kevinmd.com | Howard Smith |Christine Zharova |Nicholas Bellacicco |Shah-Naz Khan
There is a serious flaw in medical malpractice litigation, and it is not what you may think. My post about a hypothetical medical malpractice case is not hypothetical but emblematic of the flaw. Medical staff at a major hospital in Washington, DC, did depart from applicable standards of care regarding limb salvage. The patient is actually a 78-year-old family member who suffers septic shock and a left above-the-knee amputation.
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Jul 2, 2024 | 
kevinmd.com | Audrey Nguyen |Michelle Ikoma |Scott Landman |Nicholas Bellacicco
“A message to the new generation of interns: you’re not just a doctor—you’re an artist, too.”It’s the first day of residency. You enter the hospital, trying to recall basic medicine after months away from patient care. Gone are the days of hovering between unpaid trainees and health care providers.
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Jun 9, 2024 | 
kevinmd.com | Jillian Bybee |Howard Smith |Christine Zharova |Nicholas Bellacicco
In Gerald Green’s The Last Angry Man, Dr. Samuel Abelman is a general practitioner in the twilight of a career that spans fifty years of commitment to patients. The time is the 1950s, and the place is Brooklyn, NY. The problem is the proliferation of medical specialties. Although most of his colleagues regard specialization as a greater good because it promises better-trained physicians, Dr. Abelman sees specialization as antithetical to his mission.
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Jun 4, 2024 | 
kevinmd.com | Howard Smith |Ronald Halweil |Christine Zharova |Nicholas Bellacicco
Byrom vs. Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, a lawsuit tried in Maryland in July 2019, is this infamous case. It concerns the failure to perform a cesarean section and brain damage in a 25-week-old infant. It resulted in the largest malpractice verdict ever recorded in the United States, $229 million. After the trial, a spokesperson for Johns Hopkins revealed that the discussion of some facts during the trial was limited by “federal law.” This is the reason for the plaintiff’s verdict.
