Category: General

Our parents and teachers taught us that name-calling and other forms of verbal teasing can’t really hurt us. I can’t possibly give an accurate count of the number of times I was told that “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”

That old adage is now being called into question by new research from UCLA. Dr. Naomi Eisenberger has found that social rejection and physical pain are intrinsically linked in the brain, so much so that a lack of the former can impact the latter.

How is it that social rejection could affect physical pain? In an experiment published in the 2006 issue of the journal Pain, Eisenberger used 75 subjects to explore perceptions of physical pain in the context of social situations. First, the researchers identified each person’s unique pain threshold by transmitting varying levels of heat to the forearm. The participants graded pain levels until they reached “very unpleasant.” This provided a baseline for the participants’ “normal” pain thresholds under normal conditions.

The test subjects then played a game of ball-tossing with 3 characters on a computer. One character represented the participant, who was told by the researchers that the other two characters were played by real people. (Actually, the other characters were computer-controlled.) The participant was either a) socially included by having the ball tossed to the participant, or excluded, in which case the ball was never tossed to the participant. In the final 30 seconds of the game, a new heat stimulus was applied and subjects again rated the level of pain they felt.

The excluded group participants reported 67% more social distress on average, which was not particularly surprising. What was more of a surprise was that the same people who reported great social distress from the game also reported higher pain ratings at the end of the game—showing a link between social and physical pain.

The findings by Dr. Eisenberger were supported by other studies which demonstrate a connection between emotional and physical pain. Many functional MRI (fMRI) studies, which measure functional brain activity through visualization of blood flow, have confirmed that emotional and physical pain both activate the brain’s dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Still other studies note that people who suffer from physical conditions such as chronic pain are more likely to have emotional anxiety and feel social rejection more deeply.

People who have suffered traumatic injuries often suffer obvious physical disabilities, pain and disfigurement. The suffering they experience is less obvious to others, but is no less real to the individuals who’ve been injured and their families.Those individuals have been thrown into a new way of living. Their home, work and recreational lives may have been turned upside down, and they frequently reach a point where they feel that they have been left alone to deal with thier very personal pain and fears. They can feel isolated and rejected by those who had been around them when they were well, but seem to have left their lives once injury has kept them from being a full participant in society’s living. And now, we know, and have scientific proof, of the sad fact that isolation, the stigma of rejection and emotional distress we knew was there can actually worsen the physical pain suffered by the injured person. An awful cycling of physical and emotional pain that can be crippling.

If you or a loved one has suffered a serious and disabling injury because of someone else’s fault, you may be able to take actions to help find your way through the difficult times ahead. At Lane Brown, LLC, our attorneys have spent decades helping people cope with the devastating impact that serious injuries can have. Please contact the attorneys of Lane Brown, LLC, or call us at 312-332-1400 to speak with us about your options. We can help. To learn more about Lane Brown, please visit our website at lanebrownlaw.com

Category: General

Labels: disabling injury pain trauma

Staff shortages and overextended shifts for nurses are a nationwide issue, according to National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union representing registered nurses, with nearly 185,000 members throughout the country. “Chronic understaffing is rampant throughout hospitals around the country,” said Bonnie Castillo, the union’s government relations director. “It is probably the single biggest issue facing nurses nowadays, and it’s not only affecting nurses, but patient health as well.”

Hospitals choosing to understaff and overwork their nursing staffs risk the health of nurses and patients alike. Recently, the husband of an Ohio nurse who was killed in a car accident while driving home after a 12-hour shift, filed a wrongful death lawsuit, alleging that from 2011 to the time of her death, his wife’s unit at the Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati was “regularly understaffed,” causing some nurses, including his wife, to work through breaks and pick up additional shifts.

While the nurses themselves may be exercising a choice to work longer and harder hours, patients do not enjoy the choice of who their nurses are, or what their state of readiness or exhaustion may be. Nursing understaffing and exhaustion is dangerous, especially to patients!

If you or a loved one has been injured during a Chicago hospital stay, you may be able to take action. Please contact the attorneys of Lane Brown, LLC, or call us at 312-332-1400 to speak with us about your options. We can help.

Exciting new technology could be able to provide a “Black Box” in every operating room.

Every time there is a private or commercial airplane crash, investigators retrieve the flight data recorder, known as a “Black Box”, to determine what went wrong. The same type of technology has been developed by a Canadian surgeon for use in operating rooms to find out why adverse events happen and what can be done in the future to improve patient safety and enhance surgical outcomes.

“It’s amazing how the aviation industry approaches error analysis and how they’re able to identify the root cause and chain of events that led to a disaster,” says Teodor Grantcharov, MD, PhD, an associate professor in the department of surgery at the University of Toronto and a general surgeon at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital. “It’s quite unbelievable that we haven’t yet done this in surgery.”

His black box platform captures video from the surgeon’s imaging equipment and from a camera mounted in the operating room. It also captures audio recordings of surgical team interactions, tracks physiological data from the anesthesia monitor, and records the room’s decibel levels and air temperature.

The software syncs all the inputs, which timestamps every event during surgery, and every event can be looked at from many different perspectives.  At a particular point in time during a surgery, for example, the patient’s vital signs can be known, and at the same time, the surgical team’s discussions and actions can actually be seen and heard. Surgical techniques can be known with real precision. The goal is to determine the factors that led to an error, and come up with ways to limit those factors from harming again.

Dr. Grantcharov has collected records and is in the process of capturing data, and hopes to release his findings sometime next year. For now, he offers a sneak peek: “The number of errors and adverse events in the OR that require corrective measures are more than we thought,” he says.

In the future, he believes the black box will be used to analyze adverse events or assess new procedures, technology and techniques. But will surgeons and surgical teams resist technology that watches and records their every move, especially in a litigious society? Dr. Grantcharov appreciates those concerns, but believes putting black boxes in ORs serves a greater purpose.

“If it’s done well and used constructively, the potential to enhance patient safety is significant,” he says. “This is not about the surgeon or the surgical team. Everything that’s going on in the OR is about the patient.”

This new technology does not create adverse events where there were none. It simply sheds light on what actually was going on during surgery. Medical and hospital practitioners alike should welcome this as an instructional tool that can save lives, and as a litigation tool that can establish the high quality of their care when medical care has been appropriate. At the same time, those patients who have been injured by substandard medical care should welcome the transparency and objectivity the technology provides.

If you or a loved one has been injured because of poor medical, surgical or hospital care, you may be able to take action. Please contact the attorneys of Lane Brown, LLC, or call us at 312-332-1400 to speak with us about your options. We can help. To learn more about Lane Brown, please visit our website at lanebrownlaw.com.

 

 

 

The Republican congressional leadership today added a demand, in order for them to vote for increasing the U.S. debt ceiling, that medical malpractice actions be limited. If the President and the Democrats in Congress do not agree to limit medical malpractice actions, they will cause the United States of America to default  on its debt obligations. It should be unbelievable that our Congressional representatives, elected to serve ALL U.S. citizens, should seek to steal their constituents’, as well as all other citizen’s constitutional and statutorily protected rights of due process and equal justice in order to accomplish the political ends and desires of their special interests. It should be unbelievable that the Republican legislators should ignore evidence, the greater good, and refuse to look to reasonable legislative measures to help address real problems.  It should be that our legislators should seek to right wrongs, and not destroy rights. 

Sadly, but not surprisingly, the Republicans’ ultimatum is neither surprising nor unbelievable. It’s become all too familiar to all of us. The Republican party once again sees nothing wrong with taking hostages, using innocent victims to achieve goals only their own special interests share…goals that are not supported by facts, logic that is supported by misinformation.  Study after study after study show beyond any serious question that the costs of medical malpractice claims and litigation has little, if any demonstrable effect on the costs of medical care, insurance or the availability of medical services. Certainly medical malpractice issues bear NO relationship to our economy or governmental budgetary obligations! If the Republicans really want to help, then why don’t they tackle the REAL problems of healthcare and costs of healthcare? When will they take on insurance reforms and forcing fair claims practices? When will they work to improve the quality of the medical and hospital care we get in the United States, instead of further beating down those families who have already been burdened by the suffering and expense of having been injured by poor medical care? The Republican-sponsored medical malpractice “crisis” is a fictitious bomb scare that borders on terrorism.  A better fiction, a fiction that would actually help our people, came from that legendary figure, King Arthur, whose credo was “Might FOR right….Not Might IS right!”

Every day we may walk into any number of locations, purchasing groceries, renting a hotel room for a business trip or vacation, looking for a new apartment building to move into, or spending the day at an amusement park. Our places of interest are endless.

In each of these locations, we enter the premises, trusting that there is an unspoken level of security established to keep us safe while we’re there. Unfortunately, criminal activity still happens, even in these well-known places. In some cases, the only party at fault behind these crimes is the assailant. However, in other situations, these crimes could be preventable, but aren’t, a case known as negligent security in Illinois. If you have questions about your assault or premises liability claim, the Chicago premises liability attorneys at Lane Brown, LLC may be just the help you need.

Common Locations for Premises Liability Cases in Illinois

There are so many locations that we visit that operate with a basic understanding of providing patrons with a basic, core level of security while on the premises.  Some of these include: apartment buildings, shopping malls, businesses, sports stadiums, grocery stores, condominiums/ gated communities, home rentals, amusement parks, and schools.

But, there is one location that may be guilty of negligent security in Chicago that many of us may overlook: hospitals. We go to hospitals, visiting others or seeking medical assistance and respite for any number of reasons, expecting to be safe during our stay. But, unfortunately, hospitals can also become prime locations for catastrophic assaults to occur.

Examples of Negligent Hospital Security Can Include:

• Did the hospital provide adequate security systems in place (lock-down procedures, cameras, security personnel)?
• Did the hospital have well-lit hallways, stairwells, entrances and exits, elevators, and parking garages/lots? Adequate lighting produces extra visibility in otherwise dark locations, and may reduce the chance of an attack occurring.
• Did the hospital have high standards of hiring and training their security personnel, or are their security members inadequately equipped to keep visitors safe on the premises?
• Does the hospital have a set “security policy” in place, that all employees are trained to follow, in the event of emergency situations? https://www.lanebrownlaw.com/blog/premises-liability-claim–don-t-trump-up-your-injuries.cfm
• Does the hospital have a known history of crime on the premises? If so, they have a legal duty to take necessary and reasonable measures to reduce the likelihood of a criminal assault incident occurring.

Assault victims may suffer catastrophic head injuries, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, broken bones, gunshot wounds or even rape when proper security measures are neglected.

If you, or someone you love, were injured in an assault while on hospital property, you may be able to seek financial compensation for your victimization. Our skilled Chicago premises liability attorneys at Lane Brown, LLC have the knowledge needed to aggressively pursue catastrophic injury cases. Call today to schedule your free appointment:  312-332-1400.