Do any of you know any laws in California. If a surgeon does a terrible surgery on a person and leaves them in terrible pain, difficulty breathing, swallowing, moving, etc..is he/she responsible for their care afterward?? For how long?? I called UCSF (UC San Francisco and posed this question to their Vascular Surgery Dept. I was told Dr. Louis Messina had left and was now at University of Massachusetts and that UCSF was NO LONGER doing NEUROGENIC TOS surgeries---(not so much because he left, I understood) but after 15 years the outcomes had not been very good.---That leaves a lot of crippled people out there looking for medical help, especially if any are close to how I am after Dr. Avery's surgery at Califonia Pacific Medical Center--a Sutter Affiliate. see me at www.sonic.net/bjj
I was told by this Representative of the Vascular Surgery Center at UCSF that patients simply went back to their primary care doctors post surgery.
I told her that was NOT an effective solution as most primary care doctors have NO IDEA how to treat a FAILED TOS surgery with so many complications.She didn't seem to care. Then she shared with me that UCSF is referring Neurogenic TOS patients to G. James Avery at CA. Pacific Medical Center. I said to the effect "OH NO?!!" He is the surgeon who made me so much worse." TOS patients please beware. It appears these hospitals are NOT keeping long term statistics on us--and there is NO ONE picking up the pieces as far as I can tell. I predict that FIVE years from now TOS surgery victims will be flooding California Courtrooms--even with the Legal CAp on Pain and Suffering. Why did they ever pass such a law--it keeps many attorneys from stopping these "out of control" surgeons and their greedy hospitals who like it when surgery numbers are high. Where are the ethics boards? Why isn't the California Medical Board stopping these barbaric surgeries, or at least monitoring closely the outcomes. We DO TOO need our scalenes muscles and our necks. Try having an automobile accident after a TOS surgery. Many of these surgeons are lying to us about our anatomy and their outcomes, and minimizing LOng and Short-term DANGERS of removing these muscles and the RIB. Best, Triste