Down in the Prarie State, rules are kept fairly strict on penalizing doctors. “Clear and convincing” evidence” of guilt must be evident for a doctor to be disciplined for negligence in Illinois, which allowed many incompetent doctors to slip by undetected in the past. A new state law is trying to alleviate that problem, allowing the punishment of negligent doctors with a bad history of at least ten years.
This isn’t to say that Illinois is swarming with negligent doctors. The chances of you encountering a bad medical experience due to doctor negligence are rare. What tips the scales in Illinois is the incredible history of negligence in each doctor: a recent study shows that a small handful of doctors, under 1% of all the doctors in Illinois, pay out 53% of all the malpractice damages (while areas like hospitals and insurance companies are paying the rest).
One of these gross examples of medical negligence can be found in the case of Dr. Jashua Salvador of Illinois. The incompetent doctor has had a history showing many instances of negligence over a number of years, and has been declaired “unprofessional, unethical and ‘grossly negligent'” by a judge conducting a hearing for the state Medical Disciplinary Board. The judge stated, “There is a serious risk of harm presented if Dr. Salvador is permitted to practice.”
In one case, Dr. Salvador operated several colonoscopies on a woman suffering digestive problems. Somehow, the doctor failed to diagnose colon cancer while operating on her colon. In another instance, the doctor placed a pacemaker on the wrong side of the heart of an elderly man. The example that stands out the most in his long history of errors was one example where Dr. Salvador was operating in fibroid growths in the uterus of Rosemary Simone. Mrs. Simone and her daughter, Michele Polan, suspected nothing. “He’s a touchy feely doctor,” claimed Michele Polan, “He said, ‘I love your mother. I would never let anything happen to her.”
Dr. Salvador had reported to the family after an operation to remove the fibroid growths, stating that he had accidentally cut Mrs. Simone’s bladder. However, he assured them that he had repaired the cut and that Mrs. Simone should be fine, despite her pale appearance upon coming out of surgery. She was suffering a great amount of pain and remained fairly incoherent. Polan insisted on her going to a hospital, but the doctor assured them that nothing was wrong. He sent a janitor from the clinic home with them to carry Mrs. Simone to her apartment. Dr. Salvador himself came by later that night to give the fading mother some intravenous fluids. Around midnight, Rosemary was still in great pain and becoming jaundiced, so her daughter called an ambulance. There paramedics were stunned at the sight awaiting them: her mother was attached to an IV bag hung from a ceiling fan and a catheter was strung from her bladder, filling with blood. Later, doctors at the aptly named Ressurrection Hospital claimed she would have died without an emergency operation. Rosemary spent nearly a month in the hospital afterwards.
Later, Rosemary Simone was able to obtain a $900,000 compensation payment for a malpractice judgement. The payment alone could not alleviate the injustice to Mrs. Simone. “He basically left me to die,” said Mrs. Simone. In court, Dr. Salvador tried to claim that he had properly repaired Rosemary’s bladder, claiming that the pain and blood in her urine were normal side effects. The disciplinary hearing judge stated that Dr. Salvador lacked credibility and “suffered from delusions of grandeur.”
If you or someone you know has been injured by medical malpractice, feel free to contact a personal injury attorney specializing in medical negligence. Thaddeus M. Bond, Jr., of Chicago, Illinois has years of experience in dealing with medical malpractice law.
