Personal Injury Resources

Merck may be evil, but the booming billion dollar no bouncing baby abstinence business is eviler! Don’t worry, everyone! Merck will go the way of the dodo next year after Zocor goes the way of the generics and Vioxx goes the way of civility. For serious as a heart attack attack!

If Doyle has a number in mind that he would sign, why won’t he tell the legislature? It seems that he wants them to keep passing bills with random numbers until he decides that one is acceptable. Is that what he calls “leadership?” If he thinks that the number should be $800,000 or $900,000 or $1,000,000 or whatever, he should say it so that the legislature can stop wasting their time and the taxpayers’ money.

Cuty Furberg has been removed from the FDA advisory panel meeting on arthritic drugs such as Vioxx (COX-2 drugs) because of his criticism of the entire class of medications made last week. He was told his invitation to take part in the panel’s February meeting has been removed. The reason given was an intellectual conflict of interest.

Other attempts hold more promise. The industry is pinning a lot of home on an overhaul of direct-to-consumer advertising. Merck's (MRK ) Vioxx debacle appears to have delivered the message that it's not such a good idea to persuade millions of people to take a drug they may not need. So there's a slow shift away from ads that push a particular brand of drug to those that raise awareness of specific diseases.

Following is a summary and guidance for West Virginia human resource managers on retaliatory discharge related claims faced by health care providers. The summary was prepared by my colleague, Ben Salango, a partner at Flaherty, Sensabaugh & Bonasso, PLLC. Ben's a member of our Health Care Practice Group and focuses on medical malpractice and employment litigation.

Next time I see one of those Believe in Cleveland ads about the Clinic’s Heart Center, I’ll have a good laugh. It’s hard to believe in Cleveland, when someone like Mal Mixon sides with big phrama and not with someone who’s made the Clinic world-famous. No use wringing your hands about the brain drain when people get treated like this.

Check out Kevin’s review of Tom Baker’s new book, The Medical Malpractice Myth. AEI, of all places, is hosting an event on the book December 19.

I recently had to install Adobe Reader a couple times because I reloaded my computer, got a new hard drive, and reloaded it again. I downloaded the file from adobe.com, double-clicked it, and selected the “custom install” option. I noticed that it had Yahoo Toolbar and Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition as part of the install. Well, I didn’t want any of that crap, so I went back to the web site to do a little looking around for just the file I wanted: plain vanilla adobe reader. That’s when I discovered what had happened. If you go to the download page and simply click the download button when it appears, you don’t get the plain-vanilla install option. But if you go to the page a wait a couple seconds, the opt-out check boxes appear for Yahoo and Photoshop! What is more, the page is carefully coded to have that effect so that more people download the extraneous software and fund adobe. I know, I know, “only a geek would care about that.” But the lawyer in me is also interested because this type of misleading web page may violate one of the new federal laws dealing with advertising software. Can you say “class action law-suit?”

Reading the book Freakonomics by Steve Levitt and realized in his discussion of Drug Dealers that, in terms of the potential earning growth, they are identical. Just like drug dealers, there is an overwhelming porportion of low waged “troops” working for zero name recognition, in the hope of that 1 in 1000 chance of making it beyond the lowest level. Drug dealer bosses and those lead lawyers in large class action law suites are so errily similar in their exponential earning potentials. I wonders how many PI lawyers dreams of a big payday instead of doing good for other people?

Gov. Jim Doyle today vetoed new caps on pain and suffering damages to victims of medical malpractice, saying they weren’t different enough from the previous set of limits to pass constitutional muster.

Maybe next time I visit the dentist I will come with my own props; props that even out the equation – my own special instruments. I’m thinking a butcher knife or medical malpractice paperwork in one hand for a negative answer, and my credit card in the other hand for a positive answer.