Happy Bastille Day!

Shortly after the storming of the Bastille, late in the evening of 4 August, after a very stormy session of the Assemblée constituante, feudalism was abolished. On 26 August, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen) was proclaimed. One of my favorite posts here is one of my […]

Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)

Earlier this week, I posted about a Florida case deciding that an expert witness used by a Plaintiff was not qualified under Florida’s pre-suit rules for medical malpractice cases. In that case, the Court ruled that the Plaintiff did not satisfy the pre-suit screening rules because their expert was insufficiently qualified. My earlier post about […]

Happy Day, Henry David Thoreau!

“It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle […]

The Lazarus Phenomenon

I look at the world through a gothic lens. I love the old and traditional mixed with the new and modern. “The Lazarus Phenomenon” describes the spontaneous return of electrical heart function and circulation after CPR (often abbreviated in a medical record as ROSC). It was first described in 1982 when I was in college. […]

One Doctor’s $355M #QualityFraud: Lap Band Surgeries

Prosecutors say Omidi incentivized employees to make sure patients received sleep studies and then falsified the results to show that patients had obstructive sleep apnea. Here is the story in the LA Times on what started with a billboard campaign across Los Angeles. Former doctor, company behind 1-800-GET-THIN found guilty of fraud

TS Eliot Knew: Lots of Information Without Enough Knowledge

From 1920 (pre-internet): The vast accumulations of knowledge—or at least of information—deposited by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little […]

The Mountain

Since 1988 when I began practicing, special interests have been promoting and manipulating pre-suit screening rules in medical malpractice cases to make filing lawsuits against hospitals and doctors more and more difficult. The result is like a treacherous mountain range mauled by giant earth-moving machines, with trails and paths that constantly shift and change. Getting […]

A Health Care Cost Price Comparison Tool From CMS

I have written a lot on this blog about “quality fraud” and how the opaque nature of medical expenses and insurance drives up the cost of care. In the US, we overpay for care based upon the quality of services delivered. Some of the increased cost comes in the form of medical error kept confidential […]

Leviathan: “… if they refuse to hear proof, refuse to do justice.”

For all judges, sovereign and subordinate, if they refuse to hear proof, refuse to do justice: for though the sentence be just, yet the Judges that condemn without hearing the proofs offered are unjust judges and their presumption is but prejudice…In like manner, in ordinary trials of right, twelve men of the common people are […]