Articles Posted in Dental Malpractice

An ex-Marine, who was left severely injured after suffering a stroke that resulted from a botched dental surgery, has reportedly been awarded $17.5 million in damages caused by the alleged negligence.

The Marine, Christopher Ellison, had visited a Veterans Administration Medical Center for dental surgery in 2007. He needed to have at least eight teeth removed. While he was undergoing surgery for the removal of the teeth, his blood pressure began plummeting. However, the dentist did not stop the surgery as he should have.

After the surgery, when Ellison was driving back home, he suffered a stroke. He was driving alone, and was not in any position to rush to the hospital for emergency treatment. As a result of the dental malpractice, he suffered severe brain damage, and now needs twenty-four hour care.

Last week, a federal judge awarded him $17.5 million. According to Assistant U.S. Atty. Thomas Johnson, the verdict will be appealed.
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Most of the dental malpractice claims that I come across as an Atlanta dental malpractice attorney  involve lingual nerve injuries or alveolar nerve injuries caused during dental procedures. However, there’s more than one way that a dentist can be reckless.

A woman in Somerset UK is suing her dentist for malpractice, after he extracted the wrong tooth. The story doesn’t end there. The dentist, who had discarded the extracted tooth into the garbage, then retrieved the tooth, and replanted it right back on to the patient.

According to the 44-year-old patient, her dentist erroneously extracted a perfectly healthy tooth instead of the rotting teeth. She realized it when she went home, and contacted the dentist. He called her back to his dental office for remedial measures, and proceeded to replant the extracted tooth. By this time, he had already discarded the healthy, extracted tooth into the waste-bin. Her tooth was retrieved from a waste-basket that had a lot of medical waste, including bloodied tissues, used needles and saliva wipes.

According to the toothpaste manufacturer, Colgate’s, web site:

When a tooth has been knocked out, the nerves, blood vessels and supporting tissues are damaged, too. The nerves and blood vessels can’t be repaired. That is why all avulsed teeth will need a root canal. However, the bone can reattach to the root of the tooth once it’s put back into place.

The odds of saving a tooth are highest in young children, but adult teeth can be saved as well. Only permanent teeth should be re-implanted.

It is important to get to the dentist as quickly as possible after a tooth has been knocked out. It is also important to avoid damaging the tooth even more.

Follow these suggestions to improve the chances of saving your tooth:

• Handle the tooth carefully. Try not to touch the root (the part of the tooth that was under the gum). It can be damaged easily.
• If the tooth is dirty, hold it by the upper part (the crown) and rinse it with milk. If you don’t have any milk, rinse it with water. Don’t wipe it off with a wash cloth, shirt or other fabric. This could damage the tooth.
• Keep the tooth moist. Drop it into a glass of milk. If you can’t do this, place the tooth in your mouth, between the cheek and gum. A young child may not be able to safely “store” the tooth in his or her mouth without swallowing it. Instead, have the child spit into a cup. Place the tooth in the cup with the saliva. If nothing else is available, place the tooth in a cup of water. The most important thing is to keep the tooth moist.

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It would have been much more effective to get in touch with an Atlanta dental malpractice lawyer, but the parent of a five-year-old child had other ideas. The father, created a Facebook page deriding his son’s dentist after a nightmarish treatment procedure, during which, he alleges, the dentist extracted a tooth without the proper use of anesthesia.

According to the Facebook page, the episode occurred last month at the clinic of a prominent dentist in the area. The Facebook poster/Dad alleges that the dentist didn’t wait for the child to be properly sedated before extracting the tooth. The child had a traumatic experience. He allegedly had to be held down by assistants, and vomited and urinated during the procedure, screaming the entire time.

What the father did next, which is what a lot of people these days do:  vent on Facebook by creating a page and trashing the dentist. He immediately created a Facebook page called “I Hate Dr. ________ of ____________,” which quickly accumulated more than 400 members. Many of the members are concerned parents, who have used the Facebook post to vent about their own experiences with the concerned dentist.

According to some of the Facebook posts, the dentist has often mistreated child patients. Some of them spoke of him slapping and strapping children down to restrain them, and others spoke of a dentist who couldn’t be bothered to wait until a child was properly sedated before beginning a procedure.
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A woman in Cook County, Illinois has filed a lawsuit against her dentist, claiming that he severely injured her lip during a procedure. That fact by itself would not have intrigued any Atlanta dental malpractice lawyer. However, according to the lawsuit, the dentist had been watching TV while he was performing the procedure. I have been a patient and a patient advocate for many clients who have been injured by dental malpractice. Some of the injuries resulting from dental malpractice that I have worked on include broken jaws, dental nerve damage, sinus perforations, blindness, and many other injuries and conditions caused by dental malpractice. It is hard to see, from my perspective, how a dental malpractice lawsuit can be justified for a bloody lip. However, I do not know all the facts and do not even begin to try to make the determination of whether that case has merit. I do know the great pains and the amount of expense involved in having a dental malpractice reviewed by an expert and filing the lawsuit–and it is quite substantial.

According to the woman, the incident occurred on July 30, 2009, when she visited the dentist for a procedure. While the dentist was performing the procedure, he and a dental assistant watched a soap opera on a television set in the room. While he was distracted, the dental instrument burned a hole in her lip.

The hole quickly began to bleed. There was severe bruising, and the wound began to ooze liquid. When the effects of the dental anesthesia wore off, the plaintiff also began to suffer excruciating pain. When she informed the dentist about her pain, he simply prescribed an oral treatment to treat mouth sores.
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A dentist, who spent more than twenty-five years in prison after being convicted of the murder of three patients from improper use of anesthesia, has been paroled.

The case involving California dentist Tony Protopappas has interested Atlanta dental malpractice lawyers for a while now. Protopappas had a thriving dental practice in Costa Mesa. Everything was going great until 1980, when three patients including two women and a thirteen-year-old girl mysterously died after they had been administered anesthesia during dental treatment at his clinic.

In 1982, Protopappas was charged with three counts of second-degree murder. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He had been granted parole in 2008, but the parole was overturned by then Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The governor based his decision on the fact that Protopappas had informed mental health evaluators that his staff, and not him, had been responsible for the deaths of the patients.

Last week, Protopappas officially exited prison. He has lost his dental license, and will never be able to start a practice again. But his lawyers says that he hopes to find a job working at a dental lab.
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As an Atlanta dental malpractice lawyer, I constantly monitor new developments in the field of dentistry and dental pain management. Chronic dental pain because of nerve or joint disorders can be debilitating for many patients. Researchers at Boston University School of Dental Medicine have now found that stem cell therapy can help substantially reduce such dental pain.

The researchers used mesenchymal stem cells derived from the bone marrow in order to treat dental pain in lab rats. In order to stimulate pain in the rats, the Boston University researchers used two types of techniques. They tied up the masticatory muscle tendon to deliver musculoskeletal pain, and tied up the facial nerve in order to deliver neuropathic pain. The stem cells were either injected into the area, or were administered via IV just like anesthesia.

The researchers found that in the rats that received the stem cell therapy, the pain subsided and did not return. However, in a control group of rats that did not receive the stem cell therapy, the pain continued for twenty-two weeks. According to the researchers, they did not find any side effects from the use of the stem cells.
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Many dental procedures can be painful, and your dentist will use an anesthetic to numb the pain. Unfortunately, dental anesthetics may come with side effects that patients are not always aware of.

One the most common side effects of dental anesthesia is the development of hematomas. A dental anesthetic is administered by an injection, and if the needle pricks a blood vessel, then blood can begin to collect below the gum tissue. The result can be a painful swelling. This swelling can cause compression of nerves and other anatomical structures in the mouth and face. Sometimes this can lead to paresthesia, numbness, pain or a combination of all of these signs and symptoms of a dental injury. While this can often lead to these signs and symptoms, not every injury sustained is the result of dental negligence of dental malpractice. To determine whether malpractice played a role in your injury requires a complete review of all records (which typically include the office notes, x-rays, MRI’s, cat scans, and any other tests performed). Once these records are gathered, and expert in the field or specialty as that of the treating dentist will be in a position to review all of the records, the facts of your case and make a determination of whether, in his or her opinion, there was dental malpractice and whether the malpractice caused your injuries.

It’s also not entirely unheard of for ingredients in your dental aesthetic to be absorbed into your bloodstream and travel through your body. These compounds can be toxic, and can affect the central nervous system. When this happens, there may be a number of alarming side effects. The person may feel excitable or irritable, and there may be acceleration of the heartbeat. A person may have excessive sweating and hot and cold flashes. More serious side effects of this toxicity can include blurred or double vision, confusion, disorientation, seizures or convulsions.
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Atlanta dental malpractice attorneys know that persons with certain medical conditions are not eligible for dental procedures. A dental procedure likely contributed to the declining mental health of popular British TV actor Peter Falk, eventually leading to his death. Falk died in June at the age of eighty-three from Alzheimer’s disease.

He had lived with the disease for years, but was mentally lucid enough to continue to work. His condition took a turn for the worse in 2007 after he underwent a series of dental procedures. According to family, within weeks, his condition worsened rapidly, and he slipped into dementia. He no longer recognized people or objects, and required full-time care. His family had to apply for legal guardianship because his condition had become so poor. Then in 2001, he underwent hip replacement surgery, contributing to a further decline in his condition.

His family struggled to understand the sudden onset of dementia symptoms, and did not make the connection between his dental procedure and the onset of dementia. However, the results of new studies published in the Journal Urology revealed that surgical procedures can exacerbate the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, and exacerbate the disease in those who already have it.
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The State Legislature of Pennsylvania approved legislation on Saturday that would require dentists to carry at least $1M in liability insurance. As an Atlanta lawyer who specializes in dental malpractice, I am eagerly following this bill, and I think it is long-overdue. There are many similar laws in place all over the country which require many professionals to carry malpractice insurance, and the area of dental malpractice should be no different.

Most serious dental malpractice injuries result from negligent root canals or dental implants which cause damage to the Inferior Alveolar Nerve or the Lingual Nerve. Many times, this damage is caused by crushing or severing the nerves and the injury causes numbness, pain, and a permanent disability.

The most common nerves traumatized in implant dentistry are the inferior alveolar nerve (IAN) and its mental branch, the mental nerve. Other nerves at risk include the lingual nerve, long buccal nerve and the infraorbital nerve because of the anatomic location of these structures. Neurosensory impairment may occur during all phases of dental implant surgery, including anesthetic administration, incisions, soft tissue reflection, osteotomy preparation, bone augmentation, implant placement, suturing and/or soft tissue swelling after surgery. The reported incidence of such nerve injuries following dental implant procedures is highly variable, but the most common causes of these dental nerve injuries are during the osteotomy preparation or implant placement. In other words, the nerve is usually crushed or severed when the hole is drilled to place the dental implant, or when the implant is screwed into place and it is screwed right into the nerve.

When a nerve injury occurs, the dentist should be able to recognize the type and extent of injury and provide the most appropriate post-operative care. Traumatic and iatrogenic (i.e., caused by the dentists who was performing the dental care) nerve complications may involve total or partial nerve resection, crushing, stretching, or entrapment injuries. The resulting sensory deficits may range from a non-painful minor loss of sensation to a permanent and severe debilitating pain dysfunction. Presently, no standardized protocol exists for the dentist in the management of nerve injuries after implant surgery. Yet, surveys at the Misch International Implant Institute™ indicate 87% of dentists have encountered situations of neurosensory impairment within their practices. Yet, no organized approach to evaluate and/or treat this condition has been presented. The most commonly used term to describe an altered sensation is paresthesia. For years, paresthesia has been used to describe any altered sensation including pain, numbness, tingling, aching, warmth, cold, and burning. Recently, the Association for the Study of Pain has standardized a nomenclature system that defines the most frequently used neurosensory descriptive terms. There now exists three distinct categories with related subcategories describing neurosensory deficits. The most significant change is paresthesia which is limited to an altered sensation that is not unpleasant. Dysesthesia is defined as any altered sensation that is unpleasant. Anesthesia is the total loss of feeling or sensation. These three main categories are used to describe, diagnose and treat (including referral) the nerve injury in situations in which dental patients have suffered dental nerve injuries due to dental treatment.
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As an Atlanta Dental Malpractice Lawyer, I know that many so-called “routine procedures,” such as wisdom tooth extractions, root canals, crowns, and dental implants, can result in horrifying dental injuries. This is because the mouth contains many vital anatomical structures, including the lingual nerve, the inferior alveolar nerve, the mylohyoid nerve, the mental nerve, the infra-orbital nerve and the mandible or jawbone.

Many instances of dental malpractice involve damage to the lingual nerve. The lingual nerve descends from nerve centers in the brain into the lower jawbone and finally into the tongue and adjacent gums. Partial or complete severance of the lingual nerve can occur during the surgical extraction of a tooth, during the injection of anesthesia, or as a result of inflammation caused by an improper dental procedure. While less common, overfilling of the space under a tooth, during a root canal, for example, can also result in leakage into the mandible canal and result in a lingual nerve injury.

Damage to the lingual nerve or inferior alveolar nerve can result in numbness or decreased sensation in the tongue, the floor of the mouth, the inside of gums, and the lips. Clients who have experienced lingual nerve damage have experienced an inability to taste their food, to know when to swallow, to stop biting their own tongues, as well as drooling, slurred speech, and a changed appearance. Lingual nerve damage can also cause residual pain, which can decrease one’s quality of life and ability to work. This type of neuropathic pain is often worse at night, resulting in sleep deprivation and adding to the emotional burden of the sensory nerve damage.

In an attempt to regain functionality in their lingual nerve, some patients have undergone complex surgeries in which a nerve from another part of the body is removed and reinserted in their jawbone. However, these surgeries are not always successful and present additional risks to the patient.

Dentists have a duty, not only to provide competent dental care, but also to inform their patients of the risks inherent in any procedures they wish to perform. If you feel that your dentist has breached his duty to you, protect yourself by hiring an experienced dental malpractice lawyer to help you pursue your claim and redress your injuries. Once a dental nerve injury is sustained, regardless of what the cause of the injury is, it is imperative that the dentist either timely treat the injury or refer the patient out to a qualified nerve specialist (usually an oral and maxillofacial surgeon whose specialty is micro-neurosurgery of the lingual and inferior alveolar nerves). The longer a dental nerve injury goes undiagnosed or untreated, the less likely it is that the nerve specialist will be able to successfully intervene and treat the nerve.
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