Syracuse Personal Injury Law Blog

The impacts of increased concussion awareness

Published on: September 28, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

Increased awareness regarding the concussion risks kids can face and the dangers head injuries can pose to children is a very important thing. It could help on several fronts. For one, it can help with encouraging proper prevention efforts in things like youth sports. Also, it could help increase the likelihood of kids who suffer a potentially concussion-causing head injury promptly getting the medical care they need.

Increased concussion awareness might be a contributor to a recent trend that has occurred when it comes to kids in the 10 to 19 age group. This trend is an increase in concussion diagnoses among such kids. This trend can be seen in recent Blue Cross and Blue Shield research.

The study, which looked at medical claims data, concluded that between 2010 and 2015, individuals 10 to 19 saw a 71 percent concussion diagnoses increase. The study also found an increase in such diagnoses among the 20 to 64 age group, but that increase was much more modest.

AI assistants may help doctors diagnose breast cancer

Published on: September 24, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

How new AI technology could save cancer patients

Doctors go through extensive training to learn to diagnose critical conditions such as cancer. But even the smartest, most diligent physicians make mistakes sometimes. According to the healthcare journal BMJ Quality and Safety, breast cancer is misdiagnosed up to 28 percent of the time. Some of these errors occur when physicians are reviewing breast biopsy samples. In the best conditions, pathologists can accurately identify breast cancer in these samples with 96 percent accuracy.

96 percent is pretty good, right? Objectively, yes, but we don’t think it’s good enough for the other four percent. That’s why we’re intrigued about a new technological development that could raise that number even high. Read on to learn more.

Paging Dr. Robot…

Researchers from Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) recently published a study about an artificial intelligence system trained to detect breast cancer. By “showing” the system hundreds of cancerous and noncancerous lymph node biopsies, they were able to teach it how to accurately detect cancer 92 percent of the time.

Determining whether a preterm birth was preventable

Published on: September 21, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

There are certain things it is generally best to steer clear of when it comes to a childbirth. One is a baby being born too far ahead of a due date. A premature birth (a birth that comes over three weeks earlier than the due date) can have a variety of risks associated with it.

This includes increased chances of the child developing harmful conditions in relation to the birth. A list of some of the complications babies can experience in connection to a premature birth can be found on our law firm’s page on preterm birth.

Sometimes, circumstances are such that medical professionals are powerless to prevent a birth from being premature. However, in other situations, there might be steps available to a doctor that could head off a potential premature birth, and help push the birth back to a time in which the baby is more developed and better able to handle the various things that go along with delivery.

When doctors give an incorrect MS diagnosis

Published on: September 15, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

A misdiagnosis can have many negative effects on a patient. One is a patient getting treatment for a condition they don’t actually have. Such unnecessary treatments can be problematic, particularly if they carry risks of severe side effects.

One medical condition that has treatments that can have major side effects is multiple sclerosis. So, avoiding MS misdiagnoses is very important. Unfortunately, this disease has certain aspects that can make it particularly prone to being diagnosed when it isn’t actually there.

For one, its symptoms can be similar to those of other conditions. Also, there currently aren’t objective biomarkers that can be tested for when it comes to this condition. So it could be easy, when proper care isn’t taken, for a doctor to mistake another condition for MS.

The challenges of enforcing distracted driving laws

Published on: September 9, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

Despite its dangers, many people continue to go to their phones when driving. This is the case here in New York and throughout the country. Now, most states ban at least some types of cellphone use while driving, like texting. Additionally, some states, like New York, prohibit all types of handheld phone use behind the wheel. However, there are things that can make enforcing such laws difficult.

One big one is that this dangerous conduct can be hard for law enforcement officials to spot. There are various things distracted drivers might try to do to conceal their cellphone use. This includes holding their cellphone down low or putting their cellphone away the second they spot anything that looks like law enforcement.

These challenges have led some police departments to go to out-of-the-box methods for trying to catch distracted drivers. Examples include:

A common treatment doesn’t necessarily equal an effective one

Published on: August 31, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

When receiving a treatment that a doctor recommended, patients generally trust that the treatment is one that actually has the potential to help them with their particular medical condition. Unnecessary treatments can have negative consequences for patients, as some treatments can have risks associated with them that patients would be needlessly exposed to if they were given the treatment when it was not likely to have a positive effect. So, one would generally hope doctors would be taking evidence of effectiveness into account when deciding what treatments to recommend.

However, a recent article on the Washington Post’s website indicates that some treatments have remained common despite the fact that recent research had pointed to them not being as effective in as wide of range of circumstances as was initially thought. The three common treatments that the article identified as being in this category were:

Back pain injections.
Arthroscopic knee surgery.
Stents.

This does not mean that these treatments are never the right ones for a patient, rather it raises the possibility that they are perhaps being used more often than is needed. So, when it comes to recommending these types of treatments, or any type of treatment for that matter, one would hope doctors would carefully think about whether the treatment is likely to have a positive impact on the patient given available evidence and the patient’s unique circumstances, rather than just relying on things like the treatment being a relatively common one.

Drivers: as the school year begins, watch out for students

Published on: August 24, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

It’s that time of year again, school is about to start. There are all kinds of things that could be on a kid’s mind and on their plate as the school year begins, especially if they are at a new school. One thing one would hope a student would never have to deal with during this eventful time of the year or any other point in the year is getting struck by a car and the injuries that come out of such accidents. Unfortunately, that is exactly what students here in the Syracuse area and the rest of New York state could be subjected to if the state’s drivers aren’t acting properly as the school year begins.

During the school year, there can be a particularly high number of child pedestrians out and about around the time of day school starts up and the time of day school lets out. For one, there can be lots of students walking to and from locations where school buses pick up and let off passengers, such as school bus stops, school zones and school parking lots. Also, student pedestrian traffic is not limited to just these areas, as there are still a fair number of students in the U.S., around 13 percent, who bike or walk to school.

So, with the school year starting up, it is important for drivers to remember to watch out for students when driving, particularly during the times of the day when kids are arriving at or leaving school. It is also critical for drivers to avoid conduct which could endanger student pedestrians, such as using a cellphone or doing other distracting activities behind the wheel, speeding, not fully obeying stop signs or being careless when backing up. When students are harmed by driver negligence, their parents may want a skilled lawyer’s guidance on what legal steps to take in response to the incident.

Children sometimes hurt in strollers or baby carriers

Published on: August 19, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

Some might assume that a problem with a stroller or baby carrier is a relatively minor thing, unlikely to cause much in the way of real harm. However, stroller/carrier accidents can inflict some substantial injuries on children. Such injuries sometimes even rise to the level of necessitating emergency care.

A recent study looked at stroller/carrier injuries among young children. The study analyzed data regarding these injuries, covering the 1990 to 2010 period. According to the study, stroller/carrier accident injury rates went down over this period.

However, the total amount of stroller/carrier accident injuries that led to kids five or under going to an emergency room still amounted to a pretty big number for the period. Specifically, the period as a whole saw around 361,000 children of that age group suffer such injuries, according to estimates.

Mothers injured during birth often go undiagnosed

Published on: August 2, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

Why aren’t doctors paying more attention to injured mothers?

In our culture, new mothers face a tremendous amount of pressure. In addition to caring for a new child, many women are expected to recover quickly and get back to their normal lives very soon after giving birth.

Unfortunately, many new moms struggle with postpartum pain while trying to adjust to motherhood. Many try to ignore it, hoping that it will go away on its own, but studies show that this pain is often serious and frequently misdiagnosed.

Why is postpartum pain so widely ignored?

Nearly 30 percent of new mothers show evidence of pubic bone fractures without having any idea that they are there. And nearly half of women experience incontinence a year after giving birth.

Why are so many cancer patients misdiagnosed?

Published on: July 18, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

Five critical errors that can lead to misdiagnosis

When your body is fighting cancer, a prompt and accurate diagnosis can literally be a matter of life and death. So why do doctors keep getting it wrong?

According to the New York Times, doctors and pathologists misdiagnose up to 28 percent of patients — an alarmingly high number when you consider the damage that an inaccurate diagnosis can cause.