Medical Justice provides consultations to doctors facing medico-legal obstacles. We have solutions for doctor-patient conflicts, unwarranted demands for refunds, online defamation (patient review mischief), meritless litigation, and a gazillion other issues. We also provide counsel specific to COVID-19. If you are navigating a medico-legal obstacle, visit our booking page to schedule a consultation – or use the tool shared below.
“Can Medical Justice solve my problem?” Click here to review recent consultations…
all. Here’s a sample of typical recent consultation discussions…
- Former employee stole patient list. Now a competitor…
- Patient suing doctor in small claims court…
- Just received board complaint…
- Allegations of sexual harassment by employee…
- Patient filed police complaint doctor inappropriately touched her…
- DEA showed up to my office…
- Patient “extorting” me. “Pay me or I’ll slam you online.”
- My carrier wants me to settle. My case is fully defensible…
- My patient is demanding an unwarranted refund…
- How do I safely terminate doctor-patient relationship?
- How to avoid reporting to Data Bank…
- I want my day in court. But don’t want to risk my nest egg…
- Hospital wants to fire me…
- Sham peer review inappropriately limiting privileges…
- Can I safely use stem cells in my practice?
- Patient’s results are not what was expected…
- Just received request for medical records from an attorney…
- Just received notice of intent to sue…
- Just received summons for meritless case…
- Safely responding to negative online reviews…
We challenge you to supply us with a medico-legal obstacle we haven’t seen before. Know you are in good hands. Schedule your consultation below – or click here to visit our booking page.
In 2017, a 99-year-old woman, Catherine Leona Delo was declared dead at Olympic Medical Center in Washington state.
Evelyn Galland said her mother’s bloodstained sheets and apparently broken nose, which the hospital acknowledges were discovered two days later on Feb. 17 at the funeral home, indicated she was alive up to two days after being declared dead.
Galland brought her mother to the hospital because she was experiencing medical and interaction difficulties and asked that she be put on do-not-resuscitate status.
Galland said her mother was denied hydration fluids and oxygen and was put on increasingly larger doses of morphine.
“It is my belief that defendant took her off fluids and oxygen to speed her death,” Galland said in her Dec. 20 declaration.
“That is a horrific thing to do. I have continuing nightmares about her treatment at [the medical center] and both myself and my mother being trapped.
“When I learned that the mortuary found my mother blood-soaked, and with a broken nose, I was shocked and worried that my mother had suffered what would be unimagined fear and pain.
“Dead people don’t bleed in quantity,” she said.
The death certificate stated the patient died of cardiorespiratory failure, severe sepsis, pneumonia, and a urinary tract infection.
The narrative being woven is this.
When the mortuary received the body to start the embalming process, they noted blood-stained sheets, and there was no record of blood-stained sheets covering the patient as she was placed in a body bag. A bruised eye and a broken nose also were not documented. This indicated a suffocating patient was trapped in a metaphorical coffin clawing to get out. A horrifying image indeed.
The medical center is having none of this. It is arguing a forensic pathologist classified the death as natural.
“[The forensic pathologist] also found that no traumatic injury including the injury to her nose contributed to her death and that her nose and eye injuries could have occurred postmortem,” according to the motion for summary judgment.
[The patient] was brought to the hospital Feb. 5, 2017. By Feb. 9, Delo was “largely unresponsive.”
On Feb. 11 she was given morphine after appearing to be in pain and lorazepam after she began yelling and flailing her arms.
“On Feb. 15, after several days of being neurologically unresponsive, Ms. Delo succumbed to her long list of health problems and was pronounced dead at 16:30 by Karen S. Tyler, R.N.”
The Medical Center filed for summary judgment. It prevailed on most, but not all claims. The judge ruled there are still too many facts in dispute. Expert testimony will be needed “to establish the standard of care on declaring death.”
Will this case be quietly settled or go to trial?
My guess – the former.
From an accounting perspective, the economic damages associated with a 99-year-old woman who was arguably minimally responsive are low[1]. On the other hand, the negative publicity associated with images reminiscent of the movie Serpent and the Rainbow would be devastating. For those of you who are scared of nothing, try watching the “buried alive” scenes in this movie to test your resolve. Props to those who remember the movie. Extra kudos to those who remember the mechanism of action of the alleged neurotoxin – tetrodotoxin.
What do you think?
[1] Sure, there are non-economic damages associated with pain and suffering…but the patient was supposedly minimally responsive even before the “event.”
Medical Justice provides consultations to doctors facing medico-legal obstacles. We have solutions for doctor-patient conflicts, unwarranted demands for refunds, online defamation (patient review mischief), meritless litigation, and a gazillion other issues. We also provide counsel specific to COVID-19. If you are navigating a medico-legal obstacle, visit our booking page to schedule a consultation – or use the tool shared below.
“Can Medical Justice solve my problem?” Click here to review recent consultations…
all. Here’s a sample of typical recent consultation discussions…
- Former employee stole patient list. Now a competitor…
- Patient suing doctor in small claims court…
- Just received board complaint…
- Allegations of sexual harassment by employee…
- Patient filed police complaint doctor inappropriately touched her…
- DEA showed up to my office…
- Patient “extorting” me. “Pay me or I’ll slam you online.”
- My carrier wants me to settle. My case is fully defensible…
- My patient is demanding an unwarranted refund…
- How do I safely terminate doctor-patient relationship?
- How to avoid reporting to Data Bank…
- I want my day in court. But don’t want to risk my nest egg…
- Hospital wants to fire me…
- Sham peer review inappropriately limiting privileges…
- Can I safely use stem cells in my practice?
- Patient’s results are not what was expected…
- Just received request for medical records from an attorney…
- Just received notice of intent to sue…
- Just received summons for meritless case…
- Safely responding to negative online reviews…
We challenge you to supply us with a medico-legal obstacle we haven’t seen before. Know you are in good hands. Schedule your consultation below – or click here to visit our booking page.
Jeffrey Segal, MD, JD
Chief Executive Officer and Founder
Dr. Jeffrey Segal, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Medical Justice, is a board-certified neurosurgeon. Dr. Segal is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons; the American College of Legal Medicine; and the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. He is also a member of the North American Spine Society. In the process of conceiving, funding, developing, and growing Medical Justice, Dr. Segal has established himself as one of the country’s leading authorities on medical malpractice issues, counterclaims, and internet-based assaults on reputation.
Dr. Segal was a practicing neurosurgeon for approximately ten years, during which time he also played an active role as a participant on various state-sanctioned medical review panels designed to decrease the incidence of meritless medical malpractice cases.
Dr. Segal holds a M.D. from Baylor College of Medicine, where he also completed a neurosurgical residency. Dr. Segal served as a Spinal Surgery Fellow at The University of South Florida Medical School. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa as well as the AOA Medical Honor Society. Dr. Segal received his B.A. from the University of Texas and graduated with a J.D. from Concord Law School with highest honors.
In 2000, he co-founded and served as CEO of DarPharma, Inc, a biotechnology company in Chapel Hill, NC, focused on the discovery and development of first-of-class pharmaceuticals for neuropsychiatric disorders.
Dr. Segal is also a partner at Byrd Adatto, a national business and health care law firm. Byrd Adatto was selected as a Best Law Firm in the 2021 edition of the “Best Law Firms” list by U.S. News – Best Lawyers. With decades of combined experience in serving doctors, dentists, and other providers, Byrd Adatto has a national pedigree to address most legal issues that arise in the business and practice of medicine.
I do hope that the case goes to trial so that the truth comes out. If the injuries were post-mortem, why should anyone, especially the lawyers, get compensated?
Not being an attorney or a doctor whose license included “pronouncing” patients, there’s little I can add about the mechanics of this vastly unfortunate situation. Mixed in this is an apparent “horror scenario” that defies anyone’s conscious experience.
That’s what I CAN add to this discussion.
As a 6 y/o child, undergoing tonsillectomy by drip ether induction, I found myself above the OR table watching doctors using the tonsil snares. I had no idea what was going on. Gradually, I encountered “curtains” of flowing bright colored lights all around me, the beauty of which cannot be described in words. I recall being “told” some things that although I remember some of them, made no “sense” to me. The closest I can come to it is a kind of “pantheism” discussion.
I woke up with a sore throat. As a child, each time I went to sleep, I tried to “consciously” regenerate the “colored curtains.” I was unable to do so.
I wondered if it was a real NDE. I got the answer as an adult, during a scuba diving accident in Hawaii wherein I was the prime participant. It was my first time scuba diving and I had no training. We were given some instruction on the boat. I went overboard with my “partner.” I immediately became lost. Nobody was around. Anywhere. They told me to come up if we were separated. I did.
I came up to an entirely blank slate. No boat. No divers. No Islands. No land. Only waves as far as I could see in every direction. I should have been terrified. This is class 1 of the most frightening experience any person, adult or child could have. Completely alone in the ocean. An d wondering if a power boat would not see me and finish me off with their motor.
I calculated my odds of survival as about 10%. It is impossible to see people alone bobbing in the ocean among the waves. I was not frightened. In fact, I swam around more or less care-free for about an hour. It was ridiculous. About the second hour, I “felt” a voice come to me. It was “irritated and angry.”
It said: “Get your ass in gear. You have a job to do and you have to be found. Take the mask off your face, dip it into the water and make a mirror out of it. Hold it above your head and move it around to reflect the sunlight. There is a search party looking for you.”
To this day I do not fear death. Most likely because I have already been dead, and I wanted DESPERATELY to go back. I have no idea about scuba gear or masks. It was my first time. I had to be told how to do it.
You can make whatever of this post you wish. I could have sued the kids who left me to die. But I didn’t. They pulled me (exhausted) into their rubber boat and never said a word to me, except a question: “How did you know about using your mask as a reflecting mirror?” That’s how they found me.
I don’t know how the poor elderly lady in the “death bag” felt about her experience. But it was probably about as bad as being left completely alone out in the ocean with nothing but a mask and scuba gear.
Michael M. Rosenblatt, DPM
The standard of care was not followed.
1) RNs are not allowed to pronounce people dead.
2) In many states, negative EEGs are required serially.
Standards differ in different states for declaring a patient brain dead.
Again these standards were not followed.
3) In California and in many other places the typical standard is for a patient that is made DNR to be denied food and water. That is horrible but typical. Then the other thing that they do is medicate the patient with narcotics so that they stop breathing and die. Hospice is designed to accelerate people’s demise. The idea of hospice being to comfort people while they are dying is a type of misconception of what hospice does. They want to provide the least care, at the lowest cost since after all the patient is dying.
Is there a slim possibility that postmortem rigors or other cadaveric movements may have caused her nasal fracture?