New York Malpractice & Injury Lawyer Blog

The surviving family members of a man who died after an alleged botched surgery and treatment have accused a doctor of malpractice in the man’s death.

According to court documents, Mary Guardiola, who is acting as administrator of the estate of Richard Guardiola, filed a lawsuit on July 22nd in Cook County Circuit Court against Dr. Anthony San Diego on allegations of medical malpractice and negligence.

Documents state that on April 12, 2013, Dr. San Diego, attempted to perform a laparoscopic intra-abdominal lysis of adhesions surgery on the plaintiff knowing that the patient, Richard Guardiola had cirrhosis of the liver, splenomegaly, hepatitis C as well as a low platelet court.

The constitutionality of a change in Florida’s medical malpractice law has been upheld by a state appeals court on Tuesday.

The appeals court ruled in part that some of the rights to privacy of patients are waived when a malpractice lawsuit is pursued.

A three-judge panel of the 1st District Court of Appeal made the decision which stated that a 2013 law passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature were in fact constitutional.

A former patient who was treated at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is accusing the hospital of medical negligence in a lawsuit.

The plaintiff in the suit claims that she was sexually assaulted last year by a certified nursing assistant after she undergone a surgery at the hospital.

The unnamed plaintiff alleges that the hospital had failed to adequately respond to her complaint of sexual assaults involving the same employee that date back more than a decade.

A Pennsylvania appeals court upheld the decision of a malpractice lawsuit win for law firm Willig Williams.

The suit was brought, accusing the firm of stymieing a hospital worker’s plans to bring a medical malpractice claim against his employer for an injury he said he sustained during treatment for a previous injury suffered on the job.

A three judge panel determined that Willig Williams and their counsel had not committed malpractice by inking a settlement on behalf of Gerald Cohen, an employee at St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. The lawsuit put to rest the claims being made by Cohen for both the initial workplace injury and the subsequent injury he suffered undergoing treatment under his employer’s care.

Media personality and Fox News reporter, Geraldo Rivera, appeared in a Manhattan Civil Court on Thursday for settlement talks for a medical malpractice lawsuit.

Rivera, 72, is suing the Hospital for Special Surgery on East 70th Street after he went in for back surgery in 2010 and came out with a crippled right foot when the surgery was botched.

Rivera claims that he has lost enjoyment of life because he can no longer jog, play tennis, ski or even keep up with his 10-year-old daughter.

The legal counsel for the plaintiff in a medical malpractice case against a physician and his employee has petitioned to be excused from his responsibility of counsel. Derek R. Layser of Layser & Freiwald in Philadelphia, motioned to the Court to be removed as attorney of record for Linda Hydro, citing “irreconcilable differences” related to the legal action. Layser claimed to have noticed Hydro that same day, and asked for a 45-day window for Hydro to secure new counsel.

Layser also informed the court that he would give specific details as to his decision to withdraw to the court, if necessary, but only before an on-camera hearing and not in the presence of the defendants in the case.

A hearing on this matter was set for Monday in Court chambers at Philadelphia City Hall.

Physician Farid Fata, MD will serve 45 years in prison and pay over $17 million after he told numerous patients that they had cancer and administered medically unnecessary chemotherapy drugs.

Prosecutors were pushing for a much heavier sentence for Fata, 175 years behind bars for the Hematologist-oncologist. Prosecutors say that Fata used his medical degree to violate the trust of his patients, give them unwarranted and dangerous treatments and to defraud Medicare in order to take advantage of patients and profit from it.

Even Chief Richard Weber of the Internal Revenue Service – Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) commented on the callousness of Fata’s actions in the case. “This is the most egregious case of fraud and deception that I have seen in my career,” he said, then added, “This disgusting and diabolical scheme has hurt hundreds of patients and their families and stolen from them something that no punishment from the court can do to make them whole.”

Sometimes patients and their families will have questions as to whether or not the standard of care that they have received from a doctor, hospital or other medical facility was according to the standard of care or if the incident constitutes medical malpractice.

One such example was written in to an advice column by a woman to a consulting attorney asking after the care her son received after a motorcycle accident.

According to the letter, her son had been in a motorcycle accident and suffered a severe case of road rash that ended with him having a hole in his arm. The motorcyclist was given pain pills and keep the wound uncovered and to scrub it daily. He was not, however given any antibiotics to address the potential of infection.

The survivors of a woman who died as a result of a methadone overdose in 2008 have been awarded $512,000 by a jury in New London Superior Court.

According to court documents, Jill Procaccini, 32, died just hours after she was treated and released from the Lawrence + Memorial Hospital emergency room. Procaccini’s estate has filed suit against emergency room physician, Thomas E. Marchiondo and the Emergency Medicine Physicians of New London, a firm which hired the emergency room doctors at L+M hospital. Lawrence + Memorial Hospital had also been named as a defendant in the lawsuit, but was removed from the suit before the malpractice suit went to trial.

Attorney for the plaintiffs, Matthew Auger of the Suisman Shapiro law firm, stated within a written summary of the case that Procaccini had spent much of her both as a heroin and cocaine addict and had been battling those addictions for many years.

A woman whose husband died as a result of gastrointestinal issues is suing the Tulane University School of Medicine and a physician employed there for medical malpractice.

The lawsuit was filed by Heather Leeming, individually and on behalf of her minor child, Kobe Leeming, and her deceased husband, James D. Leeming. The lawsuit names The Administrators of the Tulane Educational Fund, Tulane University School of Medicine, and Dr. Michael Roysteras defendant in the case. The malpractice suit was filed in the Orleans Parish First Civil District Court on May 28.

Within the court documents, the plaintiff asserts that in May 2011 her husband was admitted to Tulane for a gastrointestinal bleed. He was under the care of the facility’s medical staff until his death one month later. Leeming alleges that her husband’s death was caused by an excessive blood loss from a GI bleed and that the plaintiff failed to properly examine and evaluate the patient. The plaintiff is also accused of failing to alert the attending physician of the patient’s deteriorating condition and blood loss and failing to place him in ICU in a timely fashion.