Daily Lawsuit News

Doctors Paid Off By Drug Companies At Harvard

Shocking evidence that those doctors that protect us are actually on-the-take has broken across the country, with the center of the investigation at the prestigious Harvard school where the Harvard Medical Journal is published.

Often, ivy-league schools such as Harvard run testing and medical trials on prescription drugs before they are released to the public or FDA for testing.  This has always been a sacred cow and thought to be above refute, until three psychiatrists went under investigation at Harvard for allegedly receiving much more money from drug firms and not reporting their income accurately.

The psychiatrists in question were working on testing anti-psychotic medications on children, and the honor system that researchers work off was brought into question.  If the Harvard Medical Journal is not a report that can be trusted, long seen as a standard of integrity, the question of what can be trusted is brought to light; no one is above being paid off by big pharmaceutical agencies.

Between the years 2000 and 2007, over 1.6 million dollars was received by two separate researchers at Harvard.  The third psychiatrist at Harvard received over a million.

The senate has written a bill that would force doctors to receive no more than $500 per year without reporting, accurately and with the threat of law, for handling drug testing from drug companies.  The shockwave created by this incident will be felt for years to come, and brings us to wonder what drugs have been given an OK by independent researchers only because they were receiving unusually large payments from the drug manufacturers.

Is nothing sacred anymore?  Certainly not the image of Harvard research.

“What makes this case particularly troublesome is that the Harvard group’s research has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic drugs to treat children, as was described in The Times on Sunday by Gardiner Harris and Benedict Carey. Although supporters praise the most prominent of the trio, Dr. Joseph Biederman, as a visionary who has saved many lives, critics complain that the Harvard studies have been too small and loosely designed to provide conclusive results. Critics say they also were subject to biased interpretation through use of a subjective rating scale.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/opinion/10tue2.html?ref=opinion

Source: New York Times

Posted in Medical Malpractice | No Comments »

Donor’s Death Prompts Civil Lawsuit Against Surgeon

In California, courts ruled that a Civil Lawsuit could, indeed, be filed against the surgeon who is accused of hastening an organ donor’s death so that their organs could be harvested and subsequently implanted into waiting recipients.

In the suit, Dr. Hootan Roozrokh is accused of administering a fatal dose of morphine to a patient who was in a coma to bring his death to fruition quicker. Dr. Roozrokh was an employee of Kaiser Permanente and was on-site to handle the organ transfer once the patient had expired.

In the fact finding of this civil case, it was observed that Dr. Roozrokh ordered three doses of morphine injected into his patient’s IV within 15 minutes; despite the fact that the patient was already in a coma and not in any obvious pain. The patient, Ruben Navarro was not brain dead yet faced a definite poor prognosis for recovery.

The question that remains, and that this case will hinge on, is whether there was any level of criminal negligence on the part of Dr. Roozrokh and whether that negligence would be grounds for a civil lawsuit penalty. Since his arrest in February, the Doctor has been mounting a rigorous defense

http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2008/05/12/prca0512.htm

Source: AMNews

Posted in Civil Lawsuits, Medical Malpractice | 1 Comment »