The BBC is reporting that the British Medical Journal Lancet has issued a full retraction of the notorious 1998 article that claimed there was an increased risk of autism associated with use of the MMR vaccine. Among the grounds for the retraction: the lead author “was in the pay of solicitors who were acting for parents who believed their children had been harmed by MMR” and that author “was ruled last week to have broken research rules.”
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As long-time readers know, this blog was founded by a couple of guys who first got to know each other defending co-defendant manufacturers in the Orthopedic Bone Screw Mass Tort. That fact significantly colors what you read here. A lot of the issues that we harp on– off-label use, medical device preemption, fraud on the FDA, cross-jurisdictional class action tolling, broken device cases, expert testimony on issues of (FDA) law (that’s (more…)

We must be pretty poor bloggers. Our throwaway piece on there not being mousepads in hotel rooms drew (for us) a record 3500+ hits last Friday, courtesy of links from Above the Law and Instapundit. That’s second only to Wyeth v. Levine. And it generated over 1000 hits on Saturday and another 800+ on Sunday – both records for those days of the week.

Newsflash: more people care about mousepads than about drug and medical (more…)

Judge Weinstein granted three more summary judgment motions yesterday in the Zyprexa mass tort. The reasoning is essentially the same for two of them – the statute of limitations ran, and there was no warning causation under the learned intermediary rule. The third case had no statute of limitations issue, and was solely a causation decision. Briefly:

In Morrison v. Eli Lilly, the drug helped the plaintiff with fewer adverse (more…)

When we stepped to the plate to defend the Supreme Court’s adoption of a “plausibility” standard for pleading in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 129 S. Ct. 1937 (U.S. 2009), and Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007), we knew that academia had been almost uniformly critical. It still is.

But we also learned something else – our peers (often more than that, actually) among the trial bar, agree (more…)

I think we can all somewhat figure this out, but there are cases to where open heart surgery may the answer.  A short while back with my interview with Dr. Muhs, who is  the principal investigator on all of the endovascular trials conducted in the Section of Vascular Surgery at Yale University School of Medicine, I learned quite a bit. 
Each patient is different and thus each treatment plan for surgery is unique.  When devices are implanted (more…)

The big item here shows personal health records only making a one percent increase, and this comes back to training and education, as the survey states patients want it, but there’s still the education process on how this can happen and how consumers can take control and maintain their personal health records online. 
personal health records that are connected are an excellent way to address the issue with getting both the patient and doctor (more…)