Misdiagnoses lead to 250,000 ER patients’ deaths annually, U.S. study finds

There was a New England Journal of Medicine article decades ago that found that if emergency room patients didn’t list their complaints in the right order and in time – they wouldn’t be heard or recorded properly. Originally reported in the New York Times, this study is getting wide attention. “The study, released [Dec. 15] by […]

Writing: My Comma Abuse Took Years to Overcome (If I did).

Commas are one of the most commonly used punctuation tools, but also one of the most misused in the writer’s toolbox. You may come across prose littered with stray commas, or you may encounter writers who simply omit the punctuation, creating wildly confusing sentences with no breaks in sight. You may have been taught to use a […]

The Wait

Said the wait child, bruised ball child, pride slapped child hurts The wait child, crest felled child, tear eyed child hurts The wait child, bus stop child, late come child hurts The wait child, platform walk, idle talk hurts Pretenders, The Wait So many of my cases have involved a delay in the face of […]

Barriers To Quality Healthcare and How to Overcome Them

In my line of work, these kinds of cases often show up as patients who suffered adverse events because they “fell through the cracks” (an awful euphemism for getting substandard care). Our latest surveys of pharmacists, patients and providers to inform the upcoming 2023 Medication Access Report, support this. The surveys found that patients and […]

Happy Holiday, to everyone.

I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them […]

The Battle of Evermore: How the Insurance Lobby Rules Florida

The end of the year brings legislative sessions to a close, setting up final face-offs between special interests affected by pending legislation. Back in the Spring, I wrote in separate posts about a long hoped-for consumer win in Florida to change unfair wrongful death laws: Turns out, politics isn’t the only place where misinformation is […]

Hospital Staffing Shortages Cause Harm to Patients

These things don’t scream from the medical chart: “We’re having a staffing problem!” Nurses and doctors don’t write things like that in patient charts. Good trial lawyers know how to identify when staffing may be an issue. For instance, when emergency room nurses stop taking a patient’s vital signs for hours – that is a […]