MEDICAL MALPRACTICE LAWYER PHILADELPHIA

Waking up during a surgery would clearly be frightening for any Philadelphia resident. There would be the sounds, the realization of what is going on, and in some cases, even the physical pain. However, in the off chance that a patient does wake up, how doctors and medical staff handle this situation could lead to a medical malpractice lawsuit being filed by the patient.

Take for example a recent lawsuit that was filed against a medical center and its doctors. In this lawsuit, the patient claims he woke up during cataract surgery, only to be "tortured" by the medical staff.

In this age of information, everyone wants to always be connected. People rarely leave the house without their cellphones and many spend hours a week checking social media sites and updating their profiles. For some, this need to constantly be connected and interacting with friends and family, leads to some drivers even continuing to use their cellphones while driving.

Of course, using a cellphone while driving is already a concern, as drivers are not giving the task at hand -- operating a motor vehicle -- their full attention.

More than 40 Western Pennsylvania men were included on the Boy Scouts "ineligible volunteer files" released recently. Dubbed the "perversion files," the list includes more than 5,000 people that the Boy Scouts considered abusive and, thus, ineligible to volunteer. It is not, however, a list of the people who have been prosecuted for sexual abuse. Instead, the list was never released to the public and the Boy Scouts did not report many of the allegations to the police.

The Boy Scouts itself estimates that approximately one third of the incidents went unreported.

"There have been instances where people misused their positions in scouting to abuse children and in certain cases, our response to these incidents and our efforts to protect youth were plainly insufficient, inappropriate or wrong," the President of the Boy Scouts' national chapter said. "Where those involved in Scouting failed to protect, or worse, inflicted harm on children, we extend our deepest and sincere apologies to victims and their families."

German company Fresenius Medical Care has a huge U.S. market share of products and services needed for the provision of dialysis, the mechanical process that cleans the blood in cases of kidney failure.

The New York Times reports that the company is the country's number-one provider of dialysis machines and related products. Fresenius also has many of its own dialysis clinics that serve large numbers of Americans.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is looking into how Fresenius handled its discovery that one of its dialysis products may have been the agent involved in a high number of heart-attack deaths of dialysis patients. The federal drug regulatory agency questions whether Fresenius adequately complied with federal warning and information-sharing requirements for dangerous drugs.

The issue concerns Fresenius' dialysis drug GranuFlo that contains a relatively high level of a substance that chemically changes to bicarbonate in the body. Bicarbonate may be separately prescribed for kidney-dialysis patients to neutralize acid in the blood. Allegedly, some prescribing physicians had not been lowering those prescription levels in light of the extra bicarbonate being generated by GranuFlo in the same patients.