Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

Pain pumps are devices that are used to deliver medication to a surgical site. Medication is stored in a balloon that rests outside the body. A catheter is fed from the balloon and implanted into the surgical site, where it delivers medication for up to 72 hours. Once all the medication has been released, the patients simply pulls the catheter out.

Pain pumps are often used in shoulder surgery and work effectively when used as approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), with the catheter implanted in the shoulder tissue. However, in the early 2000s, pain pump manufacturers began advising physicians to insert the catheter directly into the shoulder joint, a method not approved by the FDA. When pain pumps were used in this manner, medication dripped directly into the shoulder joint, slowly eating away at the cartilage. Patients began experiencing a painful and debilitating condition known as chondrolysis.

As a result, numerous lawsuits have been filed against the manufacturers of pain pumps by individuals injured by the devices. But aren’t the companies that supplied the drugs used in the pain pumps also liable?

“They are, when you can find them,” says Frank Woodson, shareholder with Beasley Allen Law Firm. “One of the issues that I think that the attorneys representing pain pump victims are seeing is that is that the hospitals and/or surgical centers, wherever you had the surgery performed, sometimes do not do the best jobs of tracking what medications they placed into the pumps. I can tell you for a fact from the medical and billing records that sometimes it is impossible to determine who manufactured the medicine.”

If the manufacturer can be determined, “It is likely they are going to be added as a defendant because they knew from the medical literature that their medicine was toxic to cartilage,” Woodson says. “If they knew that their medicine was going to be used in pain pumps that were being placed intra-articularly into that joint space, then they’re just as liable as the pain pump manufacturers.”

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