Total Injury

A Kentucky man and his wife have sued the man’s doctor for amputating his penis without his authorization.

The doctor’s lawyer said the procedure was considered “medically necessary” and authorized by the patient because the patient gave the doctor permission to perform “any medical procedure deemed necessary”.

The 61-year-old man went in for a scheduled circumcision to treat inflammation. The lawsuit claims the doctor removed the man’s penis during the surgery without consulting the man or his wife.

The doctor’s lawyer said the penis amputation was authorized because the man had cancer and there was “no reasonable option other than to have the cancer removed”.

The man and his wife are seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages from the doctor, the doctor’s company and the anesthesiologist.

Related Articles:

• Man Sues Over Unneeded Testicle Removal
• Woman Sues For Unneeded Double Mastectomy

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, among other news outlets, is reporting that the state of Illinois will reconsider its state law providing limitations on the non-economic damages awarded as part of medical malpractice jury verdicts.

Though the state has twice struck down medical malpractice laws, most recently in 1997, state lawmakers wrote a new law in 2005 that caps non-economic damages (money for things like "pain and suffering") to $500,000 for doctors and $1 million for hospitals.  However, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Diane Larsen ruled in favor of the mother of young Abigaile LeBron, who suffered extreme mental impairment and cerebral palsy as the result of injuries sustained during her birth, and in fact declared the medical malpractice caps unconstitutional, as statutory limits interfered with the duty of juries to award what they deemed appropriate verdicts.

This question of the separation of legislative and judicial powers will be at the heart of the Supreme Court's decision this fall, and makes it fairly likely that the cap will be overturned once again, as the court previously ruled in favor of this separation both times it overturned malpractice caps.

There is no date set for the case to go to trial, but it could happen as early as next month, the Post-Dispatch reports.

Health Beat's Maggie Mahar offers a well-documented take on medical malpractice issues, including some startling facts from a recent article from the New England Journal of Medicine written by the Harvard School of Public Health:

• “The great majority of patients who sustain a medical injury as a result of negligence do not sue.” Indeed, the New York Times reports, although “recent studies have found that one of every 100 hospital patients suffers negligent treatment, and that as many as 98,000 die each year as a result . . .  only a small fraction of injured patients — perhaps 2 percent—press legal claims.)
     
  
• “Just 1.1 percent of all doctors accounted for 30 percent of all malpractice payments made between 1990 and 2002, while only 5.2 percent of doctors were responsible for 55 percent of all payouts.”  A very small group of doctors are losing or settling malpractice lawsuits, but they are losing big.
     
  
• “Eighty percent of claims involved injuries that caused significant or major disability (39 percent and 15 percent, respectively) or death (26 percent).”

You can catch more on medical malpractice at Total Injury's main site.