Personal Injury Law

Hip Replacement Surgeons Received Kickbacks From DePuy Orthopaedics

By Kirk Bernard, Esq.

With each day that goes by, news regarding the DePuy hip replacement recall continues to get worse and worse. Victim's have been contacting asr hip replacement attorneys and sharing their horror stories regarding their hip implants. Aside from excruciating pain, they've also had to deal with lost wages, physical and emotional trauma. The original hip replacement is already a major ordeal for patients to go through, but the revisional surgery requires an even more extensive operation with a lengthy healing period.

To make matters worse, new information has surfaced indicating that Johnson and Johnson, Depuy's parent company, had issued millions of dollars to orthopaedic surgeons in exchange for promoting their products. These surgeons then touted the products in medical journals and half of them failed to disclose their financial relationship with the manufacturers. Unfortunately, this is a common practice in the health care industry. In 2007, five of the major orthopaedic device manufacturers disbursed nearly $250 million in payments to surgeons.

Now, Johnson & Johnson is engaged in yet another public relations nightmare, bringing their product recall total to 11 in 2010. Considering that these defective hip replacements were implanted into almost 100,000 patients worldwide, you can bet the company is facing a multi-billion dollar class action lawsuit put together by hip replacement attorneys. DePuy announced that the revision rate is 1 in every 8 patients, but I wouldn't be surprised if that number skyrockets as more and more victims come forward and demand the compensation they rightfully deserve.

Full post as published by Seattle Injury Blog on October 01, 2010 (boomark / email).