When medical devices meant to improve your health cause harm instead, the physical, emotional, and financial consequences can be overwhelming. In Sacramento and throughout Northern California, countless patients face complications from faulty medical devices each year, often requiring additional treatment and lengthy recovery periods.
Berg Injury Lawyers understands these challenges and provides legal support to those affected by defective medical products. If you need help, contact us today for a free consultation.
Types of Defective Medical Devices
Medical technology has come a long way in recent decades, but medical devices can still cause serious complications. Here are a few types of medical equipment that have caused users serious harm:
- Implantable Devices: These devices, such as joint replacements and heart valves, can fail prematurely, loosen over time, or release toxic metal particles into surrounding tissue, often requiring painful revision surgeries to correct problems with hip, knee, or shoulder components.
- Surgical Tools and Equipment: Instruments used during operations, including robotic surgical systems, can malfunction during procedures, potentially causing unintended injuries to organs, blood vessels, or nerves.
- Monitoring Devices: Life-sustaining technologies like pacemakers, insulin pumps, and glucose monitors can deliver incorrect readings or fail to function properly, sometimes with life-threatening consequences for patients who depend on their accuracy.
- Pain Management Devices: Spinal cord stimulators, infusion pumps, and other pain control technologies sometimes cause nerve damage, deliver incorrect medication dosages, or create new sources of pain rather than relieving suffering.
- Contraceptive Devices: Certain IUDs and implantable contraceptives have been linked to device migration, perforation of organs, severe inflammatory responses, and complicated removal procedures.
How Medical Devices Can Be Defective
Medical devices can fail patients in many ways, each with different implications for legal claims. These failures include:
- Design Flaws: Fundamental problems exist in how the device was conceived, making it inherently unsafe even when manufactured exactly to specifications.
- Manufacturing Defects: Errors during production result in devices that don’t match design specifications.
- Inadequate Testing: Some devices reach the market without sufficient clinical trials or long-term studies, meaning patients essentially become unwitting test subjects for unproven technology.
- Failure to Warn: Manufacturers sometimes know about risks but don’t properly communicate them to doctors and patients, preventing fully informed decisions about treatment options.
- Improper Marketing: Companies may promote devices for uses not approved by the FDA (“off-label” use) or downplay known risks in their marketing materials to increase sales and adoption.
Identifying exactly how your medical device failed is vital for building a successful legal case and holding the responsible parties accountable for your injuries.
Common Injuries From Defective Medical Devices
When medical devices malfunction, they can cause serious health issues. These complications often require expensive additional treatment:
- Infection: Contaminated devices or those with design features that harbor bacteria can lead to serious infections, sometimes progressing to life-threatening conditions like sepsis that require intensive hospital care.
- Device Migration or Breakage: Components that move from their intended location or fragment inside the body can cause severe internal injuries, often requiring emergency surgery to locate and remove displaced parts.
- Chronic Pain: Failed devices frequently cause persistent pain that can be more debilitating than the original condition, sometimes leading to long-term pain management needs and reduced quality of life.
- Organ Damage: Malfunctioning devices may leak substances, generate excessive heat, or physically impact surrounding tissues, potentially causing permanent damage to vital organs and systems.
- Revision Surgeries: Some defective device cases ultimately require additional operations to remove or replace the faulty components, subjecting patients to more surgical risks, recovery time, and medical expenses.
Important Factors in Defective Medical Device Cases
Several legal principles come into play when pursuing a claim for injuries caused by a medical device:
- Strict Liability: In California, manufacturers can be held responsible for injuries caused by their defective products regardless of whether they knew about the defect or took some care to prevent it.
- Negligence: These claims focus on showing the manufacturer, designer, or marketer failed to exercise reasonable care in creating, producing, or warning about their product, thereby breaching their duty to consumers.
- Breach of Warranty: When a device fails to perform as represented by the manufacturer, either through explicit or implied guarantees, you may have additional grounds for compensation.
- Failure to Warn: Manufacturers have a duty to disclose known risks associated with their products. When they withhold critical safety information from doctors and patients, they can be held responsible for resulting injuries.
- California-Specific Product Liability Laws: Fortunately, our state provides even stronger consumer protections to hold corporations accountable, often with more favorable standards than federal regulations.
Working with attorneys who understand these legal principles ensures your case is built on the strongest possible foundation.
Challenges in Defective Medical Device Cases
These cases present unique difficulties that require specialized legal knowledge. First, complex medical evidence must be gathered and interpreted, requiring both legal and medical expertise to build a compelling case. In addition, powerful corporate defendants typically employ teams of attorneys to fight claims, making it essential to have strong legal representation on your side.
Proving causation between the device and your injury also sometimes presents challenges, particularly when multiple medical conditions exist. Expert testimony is often required—finding qualified medical professionals who can explain complex technical issues to judges and juries.
The Process of Filing a Defective Medical Device Claim
Taking legal action involves several important steps:
- Documentation of injuries through medical records, photographs, and detailed accounts of symptoms and treatment helps establish the extent of harm caused.
- Investigation of device history includes researching FDA reports, recalls, and similar cases to establish patterns of problems with particular devices.
- Consultation with medical experts helps determine exactly how the device failed and how that failure caused your specific injuries.
- Filing procedures in Sacramento courts follow specific rules and timelines that must be strictly followed to preserve your right to compensation.
At Berg Injury Lawyers, we have the resources to conduct a thorough investigation, which includes medical consultations and reviews of regulatory documents. Our network of experts can provide testimony to help judges and juries understand exactly how and why a device failed.
Compensation for Defective Medical Device Victims
If you’ve been harmed by a defective medical device, you may be entitled to recover:
- Additional medical expenses for treatments, surgeries, therapy, and ongoing care needed to address complications caused by the faulty device.
- Lost income when device complications prevent you from working temporarily or permanently, including reducing your future earning capacity.
- Pain and suffering compensation to acknowledge the physical discomfort and reduced quality of life resulting from your device-related injuries.
- Emotional distress damages to recognize the psychological impact of dealing with unexpected medical complications and uncertainty about your health.
No Fee Guarantee®
You might be worried about hiring an attorney because of the potential cost, but at Berg Injury Lawyers, if you don’t win, you pay nothing. There’s also no cost or obligation to hire or simply to speak to one of our product liability lawyers. We call that our No Fee Guarantee®.
Contact Berg Injury Lawyers Today
If you or a loved one has suffered complications from a medical device in Sacramento, don’t wait to get legal help. The sooner you contact our office, the sooner we can begin investigating your case and protecting your rights. Call Berg Injury Lawyers today for a free consultation to discuss your situation and learn how we can help.
