The case involved a man who went to a pill mill to get medicine for his recurring back pain. He had never been there before and only went because the pain was so bad that he could not drive to his usual doctor 40 miles away. He was prescribed three powerful painkillers, a mix usually given only to drug addicts.

The patient's preexisting conditions made this combination especially dangerous. The plaintiff's expert testified that the drug combination was "a death sentence." The patient died from the effects of these pills three days later.

The patient"s family sued the clinic, its director, and its owners. The jury returned a verdict of $2.7 million for actual damages and $8 million in punitive damages. The verdict was likely based on evidence showing that the doctor in charge of the clinic had never been there, that he gave the staff pre signed prescription forms, and that the defendants destroyed the clinic's records after the patient's death.

BED RAILS PRESENT A HAZARD TO THE ELDERLY

The federal government recently banned drop side cribs for infants after numerous reports surfaced of children being injured or killed when tangled in the side rails. Children are not the only ones at risk; many of the elderly are injured or killed by the side rails on their beds.

Numerous elderly hospital and nursing home patients need beds that have side rails in order to prevent them from falling out of bed and injuring themselves. However, the bed rail systems used on many beds are themselves dangerous. The FDA has recorded nearly 500 deaths associated with bed rails over the past 25 years, and some experts consider this number to be far too low because the problem is underreported.

Bed rail systems present a number of different kinds of risks. In some cases, the person in the bed can become trapped underneath the rail or between the rail and the bed frame or mattress. In other cases, medical equipment or restraints being used on the patient can become entangled in the bed rails.

Finally, although they are designed to prevent falls, sometimes a patient will climb over the bed rail and fall out of the bed. When this occurs, the bed rail makes the fall much worse because the patient falls from a greater height.

The government has taken no meaningful action to address this problem. The standards governing bed rails are voluntary. The government has never forced the recall of any bed rail system, and its agencies merely encourage hospitals and nursing homes to reduce the use of bed rails, if possible.

Where the government has failed, private citizens have succeeded, filing and winning suits over defective bed rails and other kinds of restraints. These successes have encouraged better designs and less frequent use of bed rails in the first place.

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