Delaware Business Lawyer Blog

The rules of fairness don’t apply when it comes to doctors. Let me explain. In Delaware, the law used to be that if you’re injured because a doctor commits malpractice and you had no way of knowing about it, you had 2 years from the time of discovery to file a lawsuit. Here’s an example. A patient had surgery, and the doctor left a hemostat inside the patient’s abdomen. The patient first started to have pain 7 years later, and she filed a lawsuit. The Court said that when an inherently unknowable injury has been suffered by one who is blamelessly ignorant of the act and the injury, and the harmful effect develops gradually over a period of time, the injury is sustained when the harmful effect first manifests itself and becomes physically ascertainable. Therefore, the statute of limitations did not begin to run until the date the patient first experienced pain caused by the unknown foreign object.

The time of discovery rule applies to all kinds of cases and to all individuals whose wrongful conduct injures another person. But the term “all individuals” no longer includes doctors. That’s right. Under today’s laws, if you take the same facts described above, the patient with the hemostat in her abdomen would only have 3 years from the date of the surgery to file a lawsuit. I hear you - how can she file a lawsuit within 3 years if she doesn’t know that the doctor left a foreign object in her body and she doesn’t first have pain until 7 years later? The answer is - she can’t.

The law in Delaware when it comes to suing a doctor for failing to practice good medicine is that you have 2 years if you know about it, and 3 years if you don’t. And if you haven’t discovered it within the 3rd year, you’re out of luck.

The doctors and the insurance companies pushed this through the General Assembly. I wonder how many Delawareans know about it. I want to believe that if this were out in the open, most Delaware residents would contact their legislators and tell them to change the law.

If you or a loved one is injured or killed as a result of medical malpractice, contact the law offices of Charles Snyderman and find out all about your rights and remedies.

In my last article, I discussed the 2-year statute of limitations that applies to medical malpractice cases. I also explained that you can have an additional 90 days beyond the statute under a Notice of Intent to Investigate rule. There are always exceptions to a rule, and the statute of limitations is no exception. As will be shown below, there are certain circumstances where you can have up to 3 years within which to sue for medical malpractice.

Known as the “time of discovery rule,” it applies when the occurrence of the injury is unknown and could not have been discovered by the injured person during the 2 years after the injury. The standard is not whether the injured plaintiff actually discovered that he had been injured. Instead, the court looks to whether a reasonable person should have known that a possible claim for medical malpractice existed.

Applying the time of discovery rule can be extremely tricky. If you or a loved one is injured or killed as a result of medical malpractice, contact the law offices of Charles Snyderman and find out all about your rights and remedies.

If you’ve been injured by the negligence of a doctor or hospital, you have 2 years from the date of the negligent act within which to file a lawsuit in Delaware. A lawsuit that’s filed with the court even 1 day after this 2 year period will be dismissed due to the statute of limitations. However, the law gives you an additional 90 days to file your lawsuit if you carefully follow the rules relating to “Notice of Intent To Investigate.”

“A plaintiff may toll the above statutes of limitations for a period of time up to 90 days from the applicable limitations contained in this section by sending a Notice of Intent to investigate to each potential defendant(s) by certified mail, return receipt requested, at the defendant(s’) regular place of business. The notice shall state the name of the potential defendant(s), the potential plaintiff and give a brief description of the issue being investigated by plaintiff’s counsel. The 90 days shall run from the last day of the applicable statute of limitations contained in this section. The notice shall not be filed with the court. If suit is filed after the applicable statute of limitations in this section, but before the 90 day period in this section expires, a copy of the notice shall be attached to the complaint to prove compliance with the statute of limitations.”

To show you how strictly you must follow this procedure, a medical malpractice lawsuit was thrown out by the Delaware Supreme Court because the plaintiff sent his Notice of Intent by federal express instead of by certified mail, return receipt requested.

If you or a loved one is injured or killed as a result of medical malpractice, contact the law offices of Charles Snyderman and find out all about your rights and remedies.

Lately this Delaware automobile accident lawyer has been giving a lot of thought to preventable injuries and fatalities. A recent article in the News Journal shows the consequences of driving without regard for the safety of others.

The driver of a truck was high on drugs and was speeding when he crashed into another vehicle being driven by father of 2 children. Both vehicles went off the road and overturned.

Making matters far worse than they might have been, nobody in either vehicle was wearing a seat belt.

Now, we have 2 families who are horribly affected. One man is in prison, and the other man is dead.

If you or a loved one is injured or killed in a Delaware automobile accident caused by an aggressive driver, contact the law offices of attorney Charles Snyderman and find out all about your rights and remedies.

As a Delaware medical malpractice lawyer, I've become more and more involved with clients who acquired MRSA in the hospital. Now comes a report that a 77 year old woman who was in the Abington Memorial Hospital was a victim of contracting MRSA while in the hospital. This poor woman had to undergo 20 surgeries as a result, and she ended up dying due to the infection. The hospital's chief of staff has been quoted as saying that this infection was brought into this woman's room on the hands of someone in the hospital.

The incredible fact is that study after study shows that much of the infections acquired in hospitals can be prevented if doctors and other hospital workers washed their hands before and after coming into contact with a patient.

How are they supposed to wash their hands? Well, according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention:
When washing hands with soap and water:
•Wet your hands with clean running water and apply soap. Use warm water if it is available.
•Rub hands together to make a lather and scrub all surfaces.
•Continue rubbing hands for 15-20 seconds. Need a timer? Imagine singing "Happy Birthday" twice through to a friend.
•Rinse hands well under running water.
•Dry your hands using a paper towel or air dryer. If possible, use your paper towel to turn off the faucet.
•Always use soap and water if your hands are visibly dirty.

Here's the bottom line. If you're the patient or somebody who's with the patient when a doctor or other staff person enters the room, watch them. If they don't wash their hands, insist that they do so.

For more information, check out:
MRSA Is Preventable
Infections In Hospitals
MRSA- Too Many People Get Sick In Hospitals
HA-MRSA Is A Growing Danger

As a Delaware medical malpractice lawyer, I have strong feelings when relatively healthy clients of mine go into the hospital for routine surgery, and get real sick because of a lapse in infection control. This is a series of articles dealing with hospital acquired MRSA.

A new study reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows that sepsis and pneumonia, which are caused by hospital-acquired infections like MRSA, killed 48,000 people in 2006. This is said to be the largest study to date. It was based on 69 million records of patients who were discharged from hospitals in the U.S.

Sepsis is a serious condition caused by a bacterial infection. The body’s immune system goes into overdrive, and blood clots are formed which prevent blood from reaching vital organs. This in turn leads to organ failure, which is so life threatening that 1/3 of the people who get sepsis die from it.

Pneumonia can set in if a disease-causing microbe gets into the lungs and respiratory tract. 11% of the people who develop pneumonia in the hospital die as a result.

According to one of the authors of this study, “Infections that are acquired during the course of a hospital stay cost the United States a staggering amount in terms of lives lost and health care costs.”

For more information, check out:
MRSA Is Preventable
Infections In Hospitals
MRSA- Too Many People Get Sick In Hospitals

As a Delaware car accident lawyer, I am constantly fighting with insurance companies for my clients who have received soft tissue injuries in an accident. The purpose of this article is to explain what soft tissue injuries are, and how they occur.

Soft tissues include ligaments, tendons, muscles and nerves.

Ligaments are tough bands of tissue that connect two bones together to form a joint. Their purpose is to stabilize the joint and control its range of motion by allowing movement in only certain directions so as to prevent dislocation.

Tendons are cords that come from the end of a muscle and insert into a bond. When your muscle contracts, it pulls on the bone and allows parts of our body to move.

Muscles are tissues which have the ability to contract, and so they act as motors to move a joint.

Picture a rubber band. If you stretch it, it expands. When you let go, it snaps back to the way it was originally. But what happens when you use to much force to stretch the rubber band? It doesn’t return to its original shape. That’s what happens when you over stretch a ligament or a tendon.

We’ve all heard the term “whiplash.” Despite how this word is often used, whiplash is not an injury. Instead, it explains the mechanism of the injury when the head and the neck are taken beyond the range that God intended them to go through.

Let’s take a look at a neck injury caused by a rear end car accident. Upon impact from the rear, the car is propelled forward and the body and the shoulders are driven out from under the head. The head stays still based on the law of inertia that says when an object is still it tends to remain still. As the body and shoulders are pushed forward, and the head stays still, the head snaps backwards, severely stressing the neck. As the car abruptly comes to a stop either from hitting the car in front or from the driver braking, the head recoils forward because of the momentum of the stopping car. This movement causes the ligaments and muscles to become torn and strained, and this causes hemorrhages. This eventually heals with scar tissue which is not as elastic as a normal muscle, and this in turn causes your brain to tell you you’re in pain.

As a Delaware car accident attorney, one of the battles I have to fight for a lot of my clients who suffer a sprain and strain of their neck (cervical strain & sprain) or back (lumbar strain & sprain) has to do with the way insurance companies try to minimize the consequences of what they call a “soft tissue injury.” One of the things they say is that these injuries don’t show up on an MRI or a CT Scan. It’s as if they’re saying if you can’t see the injury, it doesn’t exist. In other words, they’re calling you a liar.

Next thing they do is send you to a doctor who they choose for what they call an “independent” medical examination. They affectionately refer to this as an “IME.” Well, they’re not independent at all. They’re conducted by a doctor who gets paid a lot of money to see you for less than 30 minutes. He disagrees with your doctor about the nature of your injury and the treatment you’ve been receiving. (I have to admit that every once in a while, if you’re lucky, you’ll be seen by an ethical doctor who won’t try to distort the truth).

How do these doctors distort the truth? For one thing, they say that after examining you, there are no objective findings to support your complaints of pain. Once again, if they can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. When I get to question these doctors, I take the deposition of these doctors, they have to admit the following:
(1) They’ve been practicing since the days before we had MRIs.
(2) Before we had MRIs, they provided medical treatment to patients who had complaints of pain even though nothing showed up on an X-Ray or a CT Scan.
(3) For their own patients, they provided treatment based on their subjective complaints.
(4) They agree that now that we have MRIs, we can actually see some of these injuries that we couldn’t see before.
(5) Some day, when medicine catches up, we’ll have machines that will allow the doctor to see injuries that don’t even show up on MRIs.

So basically, their report that my client has subjective complaints is true, but the conclusion they reach from that is not true. It’s like the hubble telescope. When the scientists turned it on, they saw planets and stars they’ve never seen before. These astronomical bodies didn’t just happen to come into existence the moment the telescope was turned on. They have always been there - we just couldn’t see them.