DePuy Lawsuit Blog

When DePuy Orthopaedics and its parent company, Johnson & Johnson (J&J), initiated the hip replacement recall, it crafted a compensation program that would reimburse hip recipients for the “reasonable and customary” costs associated with another surgery. Thus, Johnson& Johnson employed Broadspire Services, a subsidiary of insurance agencyt, Crawford & Crawford.

The New York Times, on December 27, 2011, published an article about the reimbursement regulations of DePuy, Johnson & Johnson and Broadspire. According to the article, “things were not going smoothly for everyone who has had accepted DePuy’s payment offer.”

With approximately 93,000 recipients worldwide, the ASR XL Acetabular System and the ASR Hip Resurfacing System were recalled after data revealed that the devices fail prematurely in one out of eight people who have them.

The Director of the National Joint Replacement Registry in Australia, Dr. Stephen Graves, states that “It is a complete untruth that DePuy did not have reason to withdraw the ASR before now; we have been telling them since 2007, but they allowed it to be used on thousands of people.”

Mindy Tinsley, DePuy spokeswomen, says “We believe we made the appropriate decision to recall at the appropriate time given the available information.” As of March 31, 2011, the company had committed $280 million in compensatory settlements to the recalls. Design problems with metal-on-metal hip implants, particularly the DePuy ASR hip devices, may cause the metal components to rub against each other and shed microscopic metal particles into the body. The amount of certain metals in the blood, like chromium and cobalt, may be augmented by the metal bits transported from the implant device. This may cause metallosis (blood poisoning) and genotoxicity (genetic damage). Chromium and cobalt have also been linked to cancer, and might lead to the development of tumors.

In May 2011, different engineers and medical experts created a registry tasked to track hip and knee implants, after the issuance of DePuy hip replacement recall.

” The goal is to track the more than 700,000 total hip and knee replacement surgeries that take place in the U.S. each year and, over time, record which implants failed prematurely, requiring revision surgery to fix the original operation,” David Lewallen said. He is the AJRRchairman and a professor of orthopedic surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

The hip replacement recall positively urged the manufacturer to take an action on the need of the public for safe medical services and products.With DePuy lawsuit piling up worldwide, DePuy should duly address the hip replacement problems encountered by its clients. To facilitate medical attention for men and women who had bought the devices from it, DePuy should provide wide-ranging information dissemination on the flawed hip replacement symptoms.

References:

• nytimes.com/2011/12/28/business/the-high- cost-of-failing-artificial-hips.html? _r=2&pagewanted=all
• medicinenet.com/total_hip_replacement/article.htm