Washington Injury Law Blog

A story by the AP reports that Government safety advocates have announced a recall of about 320,000 Jardine cribs, after four children became trapped. The wooden slats and spindles on the crib’s frames can break. Children can get trapped in the remaining gap. The Consumer Product Safety Commission is aware of at least 42 incidents of broken slats and spindles, and four instances of children getting trapped. Two children suffered minor injuries. 

The recalled cribs were manufactured in Taiwan by Jardine Enterprises and sold by KidsWorld stores, Geoffrey stores, Toys “R” Us and Babies “R” Us. They were available nationwide between January 2002 and May 2008.

Finding AP news story here.

My friends over at the Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog found an interesting story about a doctor suing his own doctor for medical malpractice. Check out it out here.

I came across an interesting blog post by the Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog regardng a recent article in The New York Times aptly titled, “It Must Be Bob. I Hear His Hip Squeaking.” The article discussed people with hip implants, mainly Stryker hip implants, who were told to try new ceramic hip implants but have now developed squeaky hip joints. The Stryker hip implants and their sister implants were promoted as being much more durable than the previous generation of hip implants. But patients hips soon began to squeak, raising concerns that the noises were not just embarrassing and uncomfortable, but foreboding of more serious problems with their hip implants.

One patient has posted a video showing the problem: [youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=qWerMkRAAWg[/youtube]

Prior generations of hip implants, before 2003, had little problems with squeaking. The Times cited a Journal of Arthroplasty which found that 10 patients out of 143 who received ceramic hips from 2003 to 2005, or 7 percent, developed squeaking. Meanwhile, no squeaks occurred among a control group of 48 patients who received hips made of metal and plastic.

Last fall the FDA warned Stryker that it failed to take the steps needed to prevent squeaking and other problems. Many patients have had surgery to replace the squeaky hip implants. Many have hired lawyers to sue Stryker, arguing that these hips never should have been put on the market without proper testing because, as it often happens, Stryker rushed its ceramic-on-ceramic titanium hip replacement onto the market to create a competitive advantage with its competitors.

No one knows what the long term consequences of these problems are. “Catastrophic failure has been a concern in the past, with older ceramic components,” said Dr. James M. Bried, a California surgeon who fears that squeaking might be a harbinger of future difficulties.

Pain is the natural side effect from any type of personal injury recovery, including car accidents and major trauma injuries. Unfortunately for many of those accident victims, the pain never goes away. This is something that accident survivors have always known but now a major pain study by the University of Washington has come to the same conclusion. The study which was published in the journal, Archives of Surgery was conducted by Dr. Frederick Rivara, MD. According to the study almost 63% of all trauma patients still experience moderate to severe pain one year after the accident.

The study included 3047 patients ages 18-84. They all had experienced acute trauma from an accident. The researchers followed the people for over one year and discovered most of the pain was reported in the joints and extremities (44%), back (26%) head (11%) and neck (7%). Moreover, 59% of those patients with injury-related pain had three or more painful areas one year after injury.

Other findings worth noting in this March 2008 study were that pain levels at the 3 month marker were indicators on how long pain severity would continue. Basically, if you had severe pain after three months of a single trauma, most likely you would be experiencing at least moderate pain in one year’s time. The study findings encourage doctors to treat the pain as well as the injury. One important conclusion reached by the study is that “Earlier and more intensive interventions to treat pain in trauma patients in needed.”

Information for early pain management options should be available to patients so that they can choose the best treatment according to their injury and lifestyle. Where can a person go to get unbiased information? First, always keep a good line of communication open with your doctor and then start with the following resources:

A general overview of evaluating Health Information on the Internet can be found at, http://www.fda.gov/oc/opacom/evalhealthinfo.html.

A comprehensive non-profit organization called the American Pain Foundation has several resource guides for managing and understanding your pain. Here are a few helpful links:

Pain Resource Guide,

Discussion Guide for you and your doctor,

Pain Treatment Options,

Options for Managing pain,

Target Chronic Pain guide.

Pain can rob you of your family time, work productivity and quality of life. Pain is a major part of any injury claim. That’s why it is important to choose an experienced Washington Injury Accident Attorney if you have been in a car accident of other accident caused by the negligence of another person.