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”
I read with sadness today in the Finger Lakes Times that a 14-year old Clyde, New York teenager was struck and killed by a motor vehicle while biking to school this morning on Clyde-Marengo Road in Galen. This is sad, sad, sad. As the father of two teenagers, who both like to ride their bikes, and as an avid bicyclist myself, and just as a human being for crying out loud, my heart goes out to the family of the victim.
I have to say that this has been one of the worst years I can remember for bicycle injuries in this part of the Finger Lakes (Ontario County). Several deaths, several brutal injuries, including a guy with an amputated leg, and almost every one of them the cyclist was not at fault. I think about them every time I get on my bike, or one of my kids does.
Keep safe!
The kid standing behind me in this photo, trying his hand at hair styling, is my oldest son Sebastian. (Don’t worry – he has already ruled out hair styling as a career option.) On September 30 he will turn 16. Yesterday he announced that we are going to the DMV to take his driver’s permit test on his birthday at 9:00 a.m., and he is driving us home.
For most parents, this rite of passage is worrisome. But for a guy who represents car accident victims, and deals with clients’ terrible car wreck injuries every day of the week, it’s grueling. My hair is already grayer than it was in this photo.
It is a well known fact that car accidents are the number one cause of death for kids his age. It is not such a well known fact that sixteen year old kids driving is the number one cause of grey hair in aging fathers.
I am going on tour again this fall. Tickets are still available to catch my show. Email me and I’ll make sure you get in. My itinerary? Buffalo, Rochester, Albany, Syracuse and New York.
Bruce Springsteen performed in all those places. But unlike Bruce, when I am done with my gig, I really don’t expect to see any lighters flick on.
No, no, I am not a rock n’ roll star like Bruce. Rather, I’m just a humble New York personal injury attorney dashing around the State to fill other New York accident lawyers in on the newest developments in “New York Municipal Liability” law.
Today I accompanied a wreck of a man — a severely injured car wreck victim — to a so-called “independent” medical examination (“IME”). (You will see why I say “so called” soon enough.) The poor guy got t-boned a few years ago and ever since has suffered horrible pain emanating from his cervical and lumbar spine. He has had two surgeries, one on his neck and one on his lower back, not to mention countless rounds of physical therapy, epidural injections, trigger point injections, pain meds, and chiropractic treatment. Even so, he has been losing his war against the pain.
All of his many doctors have concluded that (1) he is badly injured; (2) the car accident caused his injuries (he was fine before then!); and (3) he is totally disabled.
Open and shut case, right? Wrong. The insurance company defending this case has a right, under New York personal injury law, to have the victim present to a so-called (there I go again!) “independent” medical examination (“IME”) by a doctor of their choice. The so-called “independent” doctor (paid by the insurance company) then renders an opinion whether the victim is injured, and if so what his injuries are, whether the car accident caused them, and whether he can work at all.
The New York Times just published a story titled, “A Fatal Slip on the Stairs Cuts Short a Life at 29“. Deaths in slip-and-fall cases are rare. Especially in someone that young. Usually you get fractured wrists or knees. So, an article with a title like that piqued the interest of this Central NY personal injury lawyer like a hurricane from Alaska would a weatherman’s.
So I read on. The article talked about how an unfortunate young lady was found dead, covered in blood, on a landing in a Manhattan building where she was staying with a friend. The police had initially suspected foul play, but later came to the conclusion that she was merely the victim of a slip-and-fall accident. She had been wearing high heels, was carrying a heavy bag and “the stairs were slippery“. The story goes on to talk about what an amazing person this was, how she was having some trouble in her marriage, and how she had just had a really tough week. A nice human interest story for sure, but what I am interested in is, “why were the stairs slippery”? So I kept waiting to get to that part.
And I never did. The article did not say what caused the steps to be slippery. It appears this was an indoor stairway. If the stairs were wet, I would want to know whether (1) management had just mopped them and left them that way with no warning?, or (2) there was a leak in the roof above, or (3) a tenant or someone else had just spilled a soda or something there. All this would be important for me if I were representing the estate of this young lady in a slip-and-fall case in New York against the landlord. In scenarios (1) and (2), the landlord could probably be held liable for negligent maintenance, but in scenario number (3) probably not (unless the spill had been there for a significant period of time, enough time for the landlord’s staff to notice it and clean it up).
Just read an article in the New York Times titled, “How to Know if You Have Enough Auto Insurance“. The article gave some interesting statistics: Nationally, the average jury award for motor vehicle accident injuries is $181,197, and about 5 percent of car accident injury claims in 2010 were for more than $100,000 while only about 2 percent reached $300,000.
Then there are those occasional multi-million dollar jury verdicts. How do you protect yourself against those?
Anyone can make a mistake driving, including you. Do you need to protect yourself against such judgments? Is it expensive to do?
I was both surprised and delighted to spot an article in the Syracuse Post Standard titled, “Five Things Drivers and Cyclists Need to Know about Each Other”. As an avid cyclist and a Central and Syracuse New York accident lawyer representing injured cyclists, I applaud the Post Standard for bringing to a wider audience some safety tips I have been blogging about for years:
For cyclists, (1) be predictable, not weirdly spontaneous, so motorists will know what you are about to do. You can be predictable simply by following the same rules of the road a motorist must follow: obey all traffic rules/laws, for example, drive on the right side of the road, stop at red lights and stop signs. (2) Imagine you are invisible (you are!) so that you drive totally defensively; (3) try to make eye contact with drivers at intersections; (4) watch out for those parked car doors opening!; (5) don’t have music plugged into your ears (the law in New York requires you to have one ear un-plugged, but that’s not good enough, keep them both free to help save your life!); (6) always wear a helmet (required by law for those under 14, but required by love-of-life for all); (7) be visible; where bright colors in the day, and use bike lights at night (I recommend flashing lights even in the daytime — you are that much more visible – but remember to PRETEND you are INVISIBLE); (8) no sidewalk riding; (9) you are allowed to ride two-abreast, except when traffic wants to pass you, and then you must go single file.
For motorists: (1) Look out for us cyclists! Hey, we are here!; (2) Reduce speed when encountering cyclists; (3) give us room when you pass us! (4 feet at least); (4) if you can’t pass us safely, wait!
We should learn from our mistakes. Actually, a famous New York law professor and commentator, David Siegel, always says that we should learn from others’ mistakes. That’s a much less painful way of learning.
Having practiced as a Central and Syracuse New York personal injury and medical malpractice lawyer for many years, I sometimes get the impression that corporations, hospitals and doctors do not learn from others’ mistakes (the pain-free way) or even from their own (the painful way). They just repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
Sure, that keeps someone like me in business, but wouldn’t it be better for the rest of us if hospitals and others learned from their mistakes, minimized them, and put me out of business? (Don’t worry about me – I can always be a greeter at Walmart, if they don’t mind that I have sued them a couple of times).
For a 57 year-old Central New York personal injury lawyer, I’m pretty social-media savvy. I blog, I tweet, I google, I post on Facebook, etc. So when I read some twitter chatter about an article titled “Juror Misconduct in the Age of Social Networking”, I googled the article and read it. It was a good read, and since you might not have the time or inclination to read the whole thing, let me summarize it for you.
It starts with this quote from Albert Einstein: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity”. I assume Einstein was thinking of the atomic bomb, not social media. I don’t think you can call social media an atomic bomb, though its impact on juries is certainly somewhat explosive.
The article goes on to describe how jurors are “tweeting”, “Facebooking” and googling with smartphones during jury duties, often in defiance of the judge’s order not to. If they are posting information about the case, or discussing it at all, or googling for information about the lawyers, their clients or witnesses, well, they are violating their juror oath. Jurors have been caught posting things like, “it’s gonna be fun to tell the defendant he’s GUILTY”. Other jurors have been caught trying to “friend” witnesses on Facebook. They have also conducted improper “investigations” online, for example, regarding the distance between two relevant locations, or the yearly profits of a defendant corporation.
Central New York Injury Lawyer Blog
