Category: Featured

A San Diego woman is suing an unlicensed acupuncturist, claiming that a procedure he mishandled caused her lung to collapse.

“I remember I was sitting there… having a hard time breathing, so I kept trying to take a deep breath,” plaintiff Jaime Del Fierro said. “I didn’t know if it was a nerve that was hit or a muscle, and maybe when I breathe it was kind of pinching the nerve, I had no idea. I mean anytime I had acupuncture before I had great results.”

Del Fierro went to Dr. Walker Scott for help with her ongoing tension headaches, paying him for chiropractic adjustments and for acupuncture procedures. When she told Scott about the pain, she says he dismissed her symptoms and sent her home. Several hours later, Del Fierro took herself to a hospital, where she then underwent surgery for what doctors told her was a collapsed lung.

“It was really, really scary for me,” she said. “I kind of went into like a really dark place because I faced mortality.”

According to the lawsuit, one of Scott’s acupuncture needles “pierced through plaintiff’s chest wall and into the pleural space surrounding her lungs, causing acute pneumothorax, a collapsed lung.”

Now, Del Fierro is suing Scott for thousands of dollars in hospital bills and damages. Sean Foldenauer, Del Fierro’s attorney, said that the lawsuit also seeks a court injunction for Dr. Walker Scott to stop performing acupuncture on patients.

Though he would not comment on the specifics of the case, Scott did say in an interview that the lawsuit came as a big surprise.

“This is my first time ever dealing with anything of this magnitude, so I guess I’ll have to say, you know, I wish I could tell you way, way more but you’ll have to give it a little while and I’ll get back to you,” he said.

In order to guard against such incidents and ensure that practitioners are properly trained, it takes five years and over 3,000 hours for the California state board to grant a license to a practitioner.

Though his website lists “electro-acupuncture” as an area of practice, state records show that Scott does not have an acupuncture license.

“It’s really important to do your homework because had I known that he wasn’t licensed, I never would have went to see him,” said Del Fierro. “I just don’t want anybody to suffer like I did. I don’t want it to ever happen again.”

The Centre Area Transportation Authority (CATA), which serves State College, PA, has said the massive, bumper-to-bumper graphic advertisements that currently emblazon the sides of its buses are here to stay.

According to a February 16 StateCollege.com article, these wrap-around ads were first applied to four CATA buses in January 2014 as part of a year-long test run. In a recent meeting, CATA board members voted to make these wraps permanent, which means all CATA buses will now be emblazoned with these giant ads.

Mobile advertisements such as vehicle wraps are among the most effective methods for generating brand exposure, as more than 95% of Americans report being reached by mobile advertising regularly.

The CATA vehicle wrap ads cover almost every inch of each bus, including most of its windows. For obvious safety reasons, the front windshield and front-side windows are not covered.

Public reception to these mobile billboards has been largely mixed. Some people voiced concerns about the bus windows being covered; however, many CATA riders told StateCollege.com that the bold advertisements don’t bother them.

“Overall, the input we received was very positive,” CATA spokesperson Jackie Sheader explained. “There were a couple of concerns, mainly about aesthetics and maintaining the CATA brand on our buses.”

The bus wraps have brought a major source of funding to CATA, which had been struggling financially up until this point — CATA would have had to cut the number of bus routes it offers if it hadn’t found a way to make more money. Sheader said the four trial bus wraps helped generate $35,000 toward CATA’s bottom line in their first year of use.

Full implementation of the bus wraps will be gradual. CATA plans to have 12 of its 71 buses covered in wrap graphics by July 1, according to Sheader. If every ad opportunity is purchased, these wraps could ultimately bring in as much as $120,000 in funding for CATA each year.

In most cases involving 911 responders and life-threatening medical conditions, patients call the emergency hotline before being transported to the nearest emergency room. But for Christy Mitchell, a Georgia resident with a rare pulmonary disease, simply going to the emergency room at Gwinnett Medical Center in Lawrenceville, Georgia was not enough — Mitchell actually had to call 911 after arriving at the hospital’s emergency room because she wasn’t getting the immediate care that she needed.

According to CBS 46 News, Mitchell suffers from a life-threatening disease that requires medicine to be “pumped into her body every two minutes” to ensure that her blood flow stays constant and transports enough oxygen to her lungs. When Mitchell’s medicine pump suddenly malfunctioned, she called a friend to drive her to the closest hospital right away.

But when she arrived at the ER, Mitchell says that she encountered some problems when she tried to explain how serious her condition is. After offering to call up the PA who works with Mitchell regularly, and who could explain her condition to the hospital staff more fully, Mitchell was told that calling the PA wouldn’t make a difference, since that medical technician worked at a different facility which had “no jurisdiction” at the Gwinnett Medical Center.

Left with no other choices — and no hope of receiving treatment before the dozens of other patients in the ER — Mitchell says that she left the hospital and proceeded to call 911 immediately.

“Making that decision to leave the ER was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” said Mitchell’s friend Brannon Chappell, who had driven her to the hospital.

Chappell then drove Mitchell to a nearby shopping center, according to Fox6 News, where an ambulance arrived and provided immediate treatment to restart her medication flow.

According to Fox6 News, the specialist who normally treats Mitchell stated that he wasn’t surprised by the incident — very few people suffer from the same pulmonary disease, meaning that very few emergency medical staff know how life-threatening it can be if the medication isn’t administered on time. Beyond inserting a regular IV, the specialist explained, the staff at Gwinnett Medical Center likely had no clue how or why Mitchell’s medication had to be administered.

Although Mitchell’s case is not the norm, it’s evidence of a growing problem among hospital emergency rooms: too many patients seek treatment at emergency rooms when they don’t really need it, and patients like Mitchell are left without adequate immediate treatment. Mitchell certainly couldn’t sit around in the ER waiting room for hours until the center was able to understand her condition — she couldn’t even wait the 15 minutes that patients often encounter at urgent care clinics.

The hospital has declined to provide any specific details about Mitchell’s incident, citing mandated privacy regulations, but it did release a statement saying that “[ER] patients are assessed and treated based on acuity [and] initiation of certain treatments require physician orders to ensure patient safety.”

After a California-centered measles outbreak that has affected at least three Utah residents — as well as 146 others in seven states, Canada and Mexico — Dr. Joseph Miner of the Utah County Health Department is still concerned that the public is not as knowledgeable as it ought to be about the potential for a serious outbreak in the state.

“Because the vaccine has been so successful, a lot of parents think they are not at risk and don’t know how serious [outbreaks] are,” Miner told KSL News Feb. 17.

Many of those affected by the California outbreak either visited Disneyland or were in contact with other park guests or workers. The strain contracted by the patients is similar to one prevalent in the Philippines, which is unsurprising given the number of out-of-country tourists who visit the amusement park every year. Most of the infected people had not been vaccinated.

All three of the cases in Utah involved unvaccinated teens from the same family.

Miner said it’s important that people look to history for perspective on just how seriously measles should be taken, and let that guide both policy debates and personal decisions regarding vaccination opt-outs.

“Cemeteries have many, many gravesites of infants, toddlers and preschool children who died from vaccine-preventable diseases,” he warned. “We could easily return to that if people decided they didn’t want to immunize.”
A National Focus on Measles

The most recent outbreak has also spurred conversation on a national level. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidance on the treatment of measles Feb. 20, saying that Vitamin A should be used.

Patients should be treated in airborne isolation rooms to prevent the transmission of the highly contagious disease, and people showing symptoms are being encouraged to call their healthcare providers for guidance instead of just showing up in clinics or emergency rooms, since a lack of adequate preparation places other patients at risk.

The good news, at least, is that modern tools in the form of electronic health records are helping physicians and public health officials to better track immunizations and urge non-compliant patients to come in for the necessary shots.

As of 2013, about 69% of physicians reported that they had already applied or intended to apply to participate in the Medicare or Medicaid EHR incentive programs — one major driver of the rapid adoption of electronic records — and having such records makes it far easier for staff to rapidly contact people who may simply have forgotten about the vaccination schedule, rather than purposefully chosen not to vaccinate.

The MMR (measures, mumps and rubella) vaccine is typically given in two doses, the first between 12 and 15 months of age and the second between ages four and six.

It’s one thing when an herbal supplement doesn’t contain all of the active ingredients listed on the label — which happens more often than consumers realize, according to a recent Clarkson University study — because these supplements rarely guarantee results anyway, and the herbs tend to have minimal side effects (if any at all). In fact, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn’t even require herbal supplements to be tested and approved before hitting the shelves.

However, it’s an entirely different matter when a business buys cheap herbal drugs from Mexico, rips off the labels, and sells them online under a different American name to American consumers — which is exactly what Stanley Brower, the owner of dietary supplement business Brower Enterprises, has been caught doing.

According to South Dakota newspaper The Daily Press, Brower bought up the Mexican pain-relieving supplement “Reumofan Plus” — which was sold in the U.S. up until the FDA and Mexican health officials issued recalls on the drug in 2012 — and sold it under the name “WOW” on at least two different websites between July and December 2012.

The recall was issued due to findings that the “100% natural” supplement actually contained three prescription drugs, including methocarbomal (a muscle relaxer) and dexamethasone (an anti-inflammatory drug), which can have life-threatening side effects when taken with certain other prescriptions. These side effects include severe bleeding, stroke, and death.

The problem with Brower’s rebranding scheme wasn’t necessarily that he sold Reumofan Plus, since the official warning was released around the time of the sales. The problem was that people weren’t aware that they were actually consuming Reumofan Plus when they purchased WOW, and therefore were not aware of its side effects. Similar to online pharmacies, which sell drugs that are rarely approved by the FDA, Brower’s business ended up causing quite a disaster with just 220 bottles.

Brower has been charged with nine counts of introducing a misbranded drug into the market with intent to defraud, and five counts of receipt and offered delivery of a misbranded drug. The 68-year-old business owner (yes, his business is still somehow running) has plead not guilty to all charges, and is scheduled to appear in court sometime in April.

Both Brower and his attorney have declined to comment on the charges.