I will soon file a lawsuit for a client who had both hips replaced with metal-on-metal hips manufactured by Zimmer. Since the hip replacements, my client’s pain has been debilitating. She has since incurred over $170,000 in medical expenses for the two surgeries to remove the two Zimmer hips and have them replaced with more conventional hip replacements. Of course, she has lost wages from time away from work.
Apparently, up to 500,000 patients have had hip replacement with all-metal hips. (There are also similar problems with the DePuy all-metal hips.) The New York Times just ran an article (6/26/11) in its Sunday Business section entitled In Medicine, New Isn’t Always Improved. The article is informative as to how a relatively untested health care product became accepted in the medical community and then caused lots of harm to patients. The article surmises that “that lawsuits against it and other makers of all-metal hips may emerge as the largest product liability cases of this decade.”
