Dennis the Menace was an early 1960s TV show about a cute annoying/loveable kid and his neighbor, Mr. Wilson. On the other hand, Dentist the Menace is a blog that has nothing whatsoever to do with TV or comics, but everything to do with today’s PopTort. Although the word “menace” may be a bit too kind.
Dentist the Menace and several other outlets are telling the story today of Michael Clair, is a dentist who used to practice in Massachusetts at a friendly looking place called Harbour Dental at the New Harbour Mall. Among the many things he did to his patients was use paper clips during root canals. Something Dennis might do with his funny dentist set over there.
He’s been criminally charged and will soon be sentenced “on two counts of assault and battery, three counts of larceny, five counts of Medicaid fraud, three counts of illegally prescribing controlled substances and one count each of tampering with evidence and witness intimidation.”
Interestingly, his license to practice had been "previously revoked in Maryland, Florida and West Virginia” but Massachusetts let him practice even though he had “been prohibited from doing work on Medicaid patients.” (This allowed him to hire dentists and use their Medicaid identification to file claims.)
Mr. Clair has been free on bail since his arraignment April 8, 2010, and how he’s moved to Maryland – one of the states where his license was revoked. And it’s a good thing too, cause Maryland doesn’t need any more bad dentist publicity since the tragic death last year of a teenager who died during routine wisdom tooth surgery. The family has now sued the oral surgeon and the anesthiologist for medical malpractice.
The family is hoping “to highlight the surgery's risks and the need for better emergency training among dentists and oral surgeons.”
According to Jay Friedman, a California-based dental consultant and author:
American dentists and oral surgeons pull 10 million wisdom teeth each year -- an effort that costs more than $3 billion and leads to 11 million days of post-operative discomfort, according to the report.
“At least two thirds of these extractions, associated costs, and injuries are unnecessary, constituting a silent epidemic of [dentist-induced] injury that afflicts tens of thousands of people with lifelong discomfort and disability.”
When Little Richard wrote "Slippin' and a slidin', peepin' and a hidin'," in 1956, I know he wasn't singing about dangerous backyard waterslides and cover-ups by manufacturers, but he sure could have been.
Back in the 1970s, Wham-O manufactured a “Slip 'N Slide”, where you’d do a running dive headfirst onto its slippery surface. But as you were sliding, air pockets were created under the slide. Anyone over a certain weight could hit those air pockets with their chin, forcing their head to stop while the rest of their body continued to slide – breaking their neck.
Wham-O discontinued the product after three people broke their necks. But then in 1982, a company called Kransco purchased Wham-O and its entire product line and reintroduced this Slip ‘N Slide. Sure enough, more people broke their necks. For example, in June 1987, Michael Hubert, a father in his mid-30s, became partially quadriplegic after using it. He sued. In June 1991, 34-year-old Bill Evans became paralyzed from the neck down after his Slip 'N Slide adventure. When Evans and Kransco discussed settlement, Kransco conditioned the agreement upon Evans’ promise to keep silent about the hazards of this product. Nevertheless and fortunately, after these cases and other litigation, the dangerous nature of the Slip 'N Slide became public knowledge. (Learn more about these cases here.)
So you are probably asking what’s this have to do with you and me? Well, if you are a fan of Toys "R" Us, you might be interested to know that just a few years ago, sitting on the shelves of your local store was a backyard water slide called The Banzai Falls. This was an in-ground pool slide that “was never tested to determine whether it met federal safety standards for pool slides before or after it was imported from China by the retailer, a violation of federal law.” It was a significantly defective and dangerous product, and sure enough users of this slide started breaking their necks:
Robin Aleo was 29, married and the mother of an 18-month-old daughter when, during a pool party at the Andover home of relatives on July 29, 2006, she climbed to the top of the 6-foot-high Banzai Falls slide, then started sliding down head-first.
Near the bottom, the slide suddenly bottomed out and Aleo struck her head on the edge of the pool, according to testimony. Her neck was broken, and she was left paralyzed and unable to breathe. She died the following day at a Boston hospital.…
Aleo and others at the party testified that the couple's daughter was present when her mother was pulled, unconscious, from the pool. Michael Aleo attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and told jurors that as he looked at his wife, she mouthed the word "more." But the injury left her unable to breathe on her own, and her condition deteriorated.…
Robin Aleo was at least the second person allegedly left paralyzed by such an incident on the Banzai Falls slide [the other one was purchased at Wal Mart], of which more than 4,000 have been sold nationwide, according to court records.
Apparently,
[T]he company that Toys "R" Us uses in China to safety-test products before they are imported, Bureau Veritas, was never asked to test the pool slide for compliance with federal safety regulations governing pool slides.
The product was tested for other product safety rules — and twice failed, once for containing lead in excess of federal limits — but not for compliance with the Consumer Product Safety Commission pool slide regulation, a former Toys "R" Us executive acknowledged during testimony on Wednesday.
Robin’s family sued and very late last week, a Massachusetts jury awarded the family:
$2.5 million in anticipated lost income from Aleo's apparently successful advertising and marketing career and other actual damages, $100,000 in compensation for pain and suffering before her death, and $18 million in punitive damages.”
Smith, the attorney for the Aleo family, said he hopes the size of the verdict and in particular the punitive damages sends a message to all retailers and importers "to make sure, not just for toys but for all products, that they comply with our laws and that they are safe.
Remember how appalled we all were watching that two-year-old Indonesian boy chain smoking when his YouTube video went viral this year? I mean, there was outrage!
So tell me, is there so much difference between that tragic situation, and one right here in America, where Lorillard Tobacco Company parked a van outside of a housing project school playground handing out Newport menthol cigarettes to children, calling them “fun”? And getting kids hooked on nicotine at such a young age that it became nearly impossible for them later to quit?
A Massachusetts jury heard about this and yesterday, they expressed their outrage by hitting Lorillard with a $71 million verdict on behalf of the estate and son of a woman who was one of these children, who got these samples at least 50 times starting at age 9 and was addicted by age 13, tried unsuccessfully to quit 50 times and who eventually died of lung cancer. The Boston Globereports,
“It’s quite big in terms of not just the size of the award but really the reflected outrage of the jury after they learned of the detailed history of what Lorillard did in the 1950’s and 1960’s, acting in a predatory manner to promote Newports but at the direct expense of the health, safety, and very lives of people, including children,’’ said Edward L. Sweda Jr., senior lawyer for the Tobacco Products Liability Project at the Northeastern University School of Law.
The novel aspects of this case was its focus on Lorillard’s strategy of targeting urban neighborhood with Newport, a menthol brand that is popular among African-Americans. According to the Tobacco Products Liability Project at Northeastern, 75 percent of African-Americans prefer menthol brands.
For more, check out the radio interview with one of the Center for Justice & Democracy’s Civil Justice Resource Group members, Professor Richard Daynard who runs the Tobacco Products Liability Project at the Northeastern University School of Law.
We forgot to tell you that last week, some 87,500 current and former Wal-Mart employees in Massachusettssettled their class-action lawsuit against the retail behemoth.
The case, which we’ve written about before, was originally filed in 2001 and involved all sorts of ridiculous workplace abuses (e.g., denying breaks, clocking out workers one minute after they clocked in for work). It’s also gone through numerous legal twists and turns over the last eight years.
Said attorney Robert Bonsignore, “It’s a great day for the Wal-Mart employees of Massachusetts … The case has been in suit since 2001: We’ve been to the Supreme (Judicial) Court twice and the Appeals Court four times, and it was a hard-fought battle. In the end, Wal-Mart stepped up and did the right thing for their workers.”
The settlement will reimburse effected employees who worked between August 1995 and the date of the settlement. The suit was part of a series of similar, multi-state complaints filed against Wal-Mart in 2001.
Corporate polluters have been getting hauled into court for many years for lotsa reasons, one being that their dirty activities are a “public nuisance”. (See more at Center for Justice & Democracy comprehensive booklet on environmental cases.)
Well now, thanks to a landmark New York federal court ruling, this “public nuisance” theory has been applied in a major global warming case brought by eight states, New York City and environmental groups. In a nutshell, the court panel (which consisted of two Republican appointees) found that the nation's largest coal-burning utilities could be held accountable for global warming.
In other words, “Now it is clear that global warming can be litigated as a tort,” said Mathew Pawa, a Massachusetts-based attorney involved in the suit. “That’s a game changer even though the court was just applying well-established law.”
This group is so out of the mainstream on global warming that its own corporate members have dropped out while it sues (hypocrisy alert!) the Environmental Protection Agency in an attempt to force it to renege its acknowledgment that greenhouse gas emissions give rise to climate change.
With 30 million Chryslers on the road, it was just a matter of time before victims injured in these vehicles, whose rights were wiped out by the auto bankruptcies (making it impossible to learn the real impact of potential defects), would start to emerge.
Meanwhile, the National Highway Safety Administration (NHTSA) is now investigating 2007-2008 Chrysler Jeep Wranglers (with automatic transmissions) following a series of complaints involving “overheating of the vehicle’s transmission.” In one case, a fire broke out—in another, “transmission fluid leaked onto the catalytic converter leading to smoke.” The NHTSA investigation, which began August 12, involves some 220,000 Wranglers. But incredibly, no matter what NHTSA finds, the company is completely off the hook for any deaths or injuries caused by this defect—unless Congress and the Administration fix this.
We’ve blogged about the evils of drug companies bearing gifts to doctors a number of times (here, here, here) so when laws to ban such practices in Massachusetts and Vermont went into effect on Wednesday, we thought it was reason to celebrate (in spite of the wistful Streisand/Diamond-like ballads that will no doubt linger in the hearts of many gift-getting docs).
For example, some doctors, such as Harvard hematologist Thomas Stossel (who is no relation to our buddy John, so far as we know), have organized opposition to the new laws—but recent history has not exactly been supportive of such efforts.
As we’ve noted before, the U.S. Justice Department is investigating Forest Labs for persuading doctors to use its drugs by picking up the tab for expensive meals, vacations, and sporting events. The company as already set aside $170 million to cover the investigation. Medtronic paid the government $40 million for dangling “lavish trips” in front of doctors to entice them to use its spinal products. And Pfizer pled guilty and paid $430 million for enticing doctors into prescribing the drug Neurotonin by giving them “lavish weekends and trips to Florida, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and Hawaii.”
“It’s a winds-of-change bill,” said Ken Libertoff, executive director of the Vermont Association for Mental Health, of the Vermont bill. “It says the relationship between pharmaceutical manufacturers and the medical field will dramatically change.”
And that may be so, as legislatures in “Oregon, Texas, Connecticut, Colorado, Illinois and Maryland”consider similar limits on drug company/doctor gift exchanges.
“Bullish on America”? Merrill Lynch has agreed to “settle a class-action lawsuit by employees who lost money investing in Merrill stock through their retirement plans.”
We noted yesterday the wonderful decision by the U.S. Supreme Court
refusing to immunize negligent drug companies from lawsuits. It's a
good thing, too, because this industry is often up to no good,
In the past, we have mentioned some of the insidious
actions of pharmaceutical companies: false advertising,
ensuring their staff does not leave a paper trail to be found during
litigation
and ghost writing medical journal articles. Not everyone in the medical community is comfortable with the
pharmaceutical industry having undue and often secret influence on
doctors. Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a story
about a group of Harvard Medical Students who are pushing back against
their professors who have received money from pharmaceutical companies
and questioned the ethics of some of these relationships. The following day Senator Charles Grassley, (R-IA), ranking
Republican on the Senate Finance Committee and longtime FDA critique,
who is investigating this practice, asked companies to disclose their
payments to the Harvard Medical School faculty.
Apparently, although some ethical rules are in place, research has
shown not all the pharma/professor relations are always disclosed.
AMSA promotes the conscientious,
explicit and judicious use of the current best evidence in clinical
care. Information used by physicians in making clinical decisions
should be comprehensive, transparent in its methodology and results,
and independent from institutions and individuals with a financial
interest in physician prescribing. Physicians should not seek
education from industry marketing efforts, whether they are in the form
of advertisements, sales pitches from representatives, or sponsored
lectures by paid physicians.
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is suing the employees of three high-volume dental
practices that allegedly got together and said, hey guys, let’s lure a bunch of low-income underinsured folks into our offices with the promise of a free dental exam—then perform a bunch of shoddy and unnecessary dental work, and stick them with high interest loans.
All told, this shady scheme was reportedly hatched against “hundreds” Massachusetts residents. The lawsuit outlines a series of grizzly examples.
One patient was charged $16,126 for “root canals and bridges, etc” which resulted in black and blue marks and swelling on her face.
A disabled man alleged that his teeth were pulled and then he was told it would cost another $5000 to finish the job.
The suit also alleges that “a person who went to Spectrum Dental with a toothache emerged four hours later with a tooth extraction, root canal, filed down teeth, a temporary bridge and, unbeknownst to her at the time, a $5000 credit line with an annual interest at 27.99 percent. She then developed a large space between the bridge of her gums, a lisp and a ‘foul odor.’”
Needless to say, here’s one more example of why we need state AG’s with teeth!
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