Personal Injury Lawyers in New York

New York State Medical malpractice and the Medical Wall of Silence


Public Citizen, a national public interest research and watchdog not-for-profit organization, has studied the medical malpractice incidence data that has been accumulated under federal law and reported in the National Practitioners Data Bank. Public Citizen studied all the medical malpractice information regarding medical malpractice in New York State accumulated from 1990 through 2004. Medical mistakes occur in New York State with alarming frequency. Worse, medical mistakes are committed time and again by the same doctors. Worse than that, their medical colleagues do not report the repeat offenders and admittedly keep silent about the medical negligence did witness and choose deliberately not to report the negligence to the authorities such as the NYS Department of Health or the Chairman of the Department at a hospital, or to the patients who have been significantly harmed.

Public Citizen reported that 82% of New York State doctors have never made a malpractice payout. However, 7.1% of New York State doctors, each of whom has paid out at least two malpractice claims are responsible for 67.7%, more than two thirds of all payouts in medical malpractice litigation. Additionally, 3.4% of physicians in New York State have paid out on at least three medical malpractice claims, are responsible for 45.4% of all medical malpractice payouts since the time that the national practitioners databank was started.

A startling number for medical malpractice is that 1% of the doctors in New York State have paid out on at least five malpractice claims are responsible for 22% of all medical malpractice payments since the beginning of the national databank.. All of these 1% doctors who have five or more malpractice payouts accounting for 22% of all monies paid, but almost 80% of these physicians who have five or more payouts have never been disciplined in any manner whatsoever by the Office of Professional Misconduct.

A recent medical article about medical malpractice was published in a medical journal entitled Annals of Internal Medicine. The editors of this medical journal interviewed 3500 physicians and found that 45% of these physicians knowingly and deliberately chose not to report income but it or impaired physicians to the heads of their department or state regulators. The editors of this medical journal also reported that 48% of these physicians had witnessed serious medical errors that should not have occurred if reasonable care was provided and having witnessed serious medical errors that caused harm to patients deliberately chose to remain silent and not discuss the errors all the harms with their patients, their colleagues or state regulators.

If you or a loved one has had surgery with an unexpected bad result and have questions about the quality of the medical care you received please call Silberstein, Awad & Miklos’ attorneys for answers. Serving clients in Nassau and Suffolk Counties and Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens, Staten Island and Westchester County.

Together we will continue our fight against FRIVOLOUS DEFENSES and DECEPTIVE DEFENSES.

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In Rhode Island, Attorney General Patrick Lynch is expected to announce $1.2 million in grants to combat lead paint poisoning.

It's the first money distributed from a $9 million donation made by DuPont more than two years ago to escape a public nuisance lawsuit brought by the state. The funds are administered by the Washington-based Children's Health Forum and are supposed to go to Rhode Island groups working on lead paint issues.

The recipients will be announced in December 2007. DuPont was originally named in a state lawsuit filed against several former lead paint manufacturers. The companies were accused of creating a public nuisance.

Lynch and DuPont say the donation was not a legal settlement, but the state dropped the company from the lawsuit. Lead can cause brain damage, behavioral disorders, and even death in children who ingest it.

If your loved one has suffered due to lead poisoning in Long Island or New York City, please contact the experienced lead poisoning attorneys at Silberstein Awad & Miklos today to schedule your initial consultation.

Tests on more than 1,200 children's products, most of them still on store shelves, found that 35 % contain lead — many with levels far above the federal recall standard used for lead paint.

A Hannah Montana card game case, a Go Diego Go! Backpack, and Circo brand shoes were among the items with excessive lead levels in the tests performed by a coalition of environmental health groups across the country.

Only 20% of the toys and other products had no trace of lead or harmful chemicals, according to the results being released Wednesday by the Michigan-based Ecology Center along with the national Center for Health, Environment and Justice and groups in eight other states.

Of the 1,268 items tested, 23 were among millions of toys recalled this year.
Mattel Inc. recalled more than 21 million Chinese-made toys on fears they were tainted with lead paint and tiny magnets that children could accidentally swallow. Mattel's own tests on the toys found that they had lead levels up to 200 times the accepted limit.

If you or a loved one has been harmed by lead in a product, please contact the lead poisoning attorneys at Silberstein Awad & Miklos today to schedule your initial consultation.

For many families, having the children help decorate the Christmas tree is a treasured tradition, starting with the strands of lights. But a CNN analysis of four common brands of Christmas lights shows levels of lead experts say are high enough to be dangerous to children.

Manufacturers do not hide the fact that lead is part of the PVC insulation that insulates Christmas light wiring. Lead is used legally to stabilize polyvinyl chloride so it does not crack or crumble with age. The lead also acts as a fire retardant.

But the levels of surface lead surprised Dr. Leo Trasande, a specialist in children's environmental health at New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine. "There is no level at which lead exposure is safe," Dr. Trasande said. "Even at one microgram/deciliter -- the lowest level in a person's blood stream that we can detect--that level has been associated with cognitive impairment in children."

In the four brands of lights tested, Quantex found surface lead levels far exceeding the CPSC's recommended children's limit of 15 micrograms.

Wal-Mart brand lights had the highest levels of surface lead, with levels ranging from 86.6 to 132.7 micrograms. GE lights showed surface lead levels from 68 to 109.1 micrograms. Sylvania had surface lead levels from 59 to 70.3 micrograms. Levels of surface lead in the lights made by Philips ranged from a low of 3.2 -- well under the 15 microgram limit--to 107.2 in another sample.

"Holiday lights are electrical appliances. We encourage consumers to exercise common sense by keeping holiday lights and other electrical products away from the hands and mouths of children," the company wrote.

If your loved one has been exposed to lead in New York City or anywhere in New York, please contact the lead poisoning attorneys at Silberstein Awad & Miklos today to schedule your initial consultation.

A train collision in Boston resulted in nine minor injuries, mainly neck and back injuries. Two MBTA Green Line trolley trains collided the morning of December 13, 2007 near the Boylston Street T station, police said. Two of the injured were train operators. The crash occurred around 8 a.m. EST and one trolley rear-ended another and one of the cars became derailed on impact.

If you or a loved one has been injured or killed in a train accident in Long Island, New York City or anywhere else in New York state, please contact the experienced train accident attorneys at Silberstein Awad & Miklos today to schedule your initial consultation.

Six members of a Michigan family have filed the first lawsuit over the November 30, 2007 train crash that injured 60 people on the South Side of Chicago.

John Hamstra Sr., 63, of Grandville, Mich., was riding with his wife, daughter-in-law and three young grandchildren when the Amtrak train hit a parked freight train, the lawsuit said. Hamstra suffered a head injury and broken shoulder but was released from the hospital and returned home, his attorney, Thomas Prindable of Chicago, said Monday.

"He was just standing up to get something" when the crash occurred, Prindable said. "He was thrown forward and knocked unconscious. They had no warning. They couldn't really feel the emergency brakes being applied."

The other five family members, who were treated at local hospitals for minor injuries, have also returned home, Prindable said.

The lawsuit alleged that Amtrak and Norfolk Southern Railway Co. caused the crash due to poor communication, excessive train speed or other negligence.

If you or a loved one has been injured in a train accident in New York, please contact the train accident attorneys at Silberstein Awad & Miklos today to schedule your initial consultation.

New Yorkers know less about which doctors have been investigated for medical malpractice than people in other states do, and the agency responsible for disciplining physicians does little to root out misconduct and malpractice, according to state officials.

Public Citizen, the national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization founded by Ralph Nader, issued a study last week and urged New York to improve the system.
State Health Department Spokeswoman Claudia Hutton said other states generally allow people to access information on doctors who are currently under investigation for malpractice, something New York law prohibits.

"We get about 4,000 complaints a year,'' Hutton said. "About 800 of them, we believe, are substantiated and we open investigations on those. There's a difference between an accusation and a substantiated accusation ... we're not trying to hide things.''

The Office of Professional Medical Conduct is responsible for investigating doctor complaints, but state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli recently criticized its work.

"OPMC management concentrates little effort on proactively identifying cases of potential misconduct or ensuring that they have received all complaints,'' according to the comptroller's report released in September.

Only about 1 percent of doctors in New York are responsible for generating the highest malpractice payouts and can't find commercial insurance coverage as a result. It can be difficult for patients to determine if their doctors are considered too "high risk'' for insurance companies, according to the report issued by Public Citizen.

The report said patients pay the price for the lack of oversight for bad doctors -- sometimes with horrific errors like surgeries on the wrong limb or the wrong patient. It recommended reducing the costs by minimizing errors and improving the state's oversight.

If you or a loved one has suffered or died due to medical malpractice in Long Island or anywhere in New York, please contact the medical malpractice attorneys at Silberstein Awad & Miklos today to schedule your initial consultation.

Surveillance video shows a Chicago Amtrak passenger train going at least 25 mph over the speed limit as it rammed a freight train inside a crowded rail yard outside Chicago last week, injuring dozens of people.

The Amtrak train’s engineer told investigators that he knew he was going over the speed limit through that stretch of track but continued to accelerate anyway. The speed limit on that portion of track, usually 79 mph, had been reduced to 15 mph by red and yellow signal indicating another train was on the track.

Moments after accelerating, the engineer noticed the freight train ahead and applied his emergency brakes; the passenger train skidded about 400-500 feet and slammed into the freight train at about 35 mpg.

The accident sent 71 people to hospitals and caused $1.3 million in damages.

If you or a loved one has been injured or killed in a train accident in Long Island or anywhere in New York, please contact the train accident attorneys at Silberstein Awad & Miklos today to schedule your initial consultation.

A truck driver pulled his 9-year-old son out of elementary school to help the father try to finagle his way through a drug test, police said.

Suffolk County officers became suspicious after spotting the two behind a deli Wednesday afternoon in Shirley, Long Island. The officers soon learned that the father had had the boy urinate in a coffee cup and planned to submit the sample as his own in a pre-employment drug test, Detective Sgt. Stephen Guyer said.

The father, 36-year-old Brandon Costantino, was arrested on child-endangerment and marijuana possession charges. No telephone number could be found for Costantino at the Centereach address police provided, and they were uncertain whether he had a lawyer.

If you or a loved one has been killed in a truck accident due to the driver being under the influence or for any other reason, please contact the truck accident attorneys at Silberstein Awad & Miklos today to schedule your initial consultation.