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

Dr. David S. Bailie, an orthopedic surgeon in Scottsdale, Ariz., says he’s lost hours of sleep over a rare joint condition he started seeing far too often in his patients who had had arthroscopic shoulder surgery. “There’s nothing worse than a surgeon doing something that causes a problem, not fixes a problem,” he told the New York Times.

Since 2005, Dr. Bailie says he has seen dozens of patients come to him months after surgery with worsening pain and limited mobility. The diagnosis was chondrolysis, a condition in which the cartilage in the shoulder joint wears away leaving bone to rub against bone. There is no cure for chondrolysis and in some cases, total shoulder replacement is required.

But what could be causing his patients’ shoulders to worsen? Several studies began pointing to the same likely culprit – the pain pump device used during and after surgery to deliver medication into the joint space. As the anesthetic dripped onto the cartilage, the cartilage began wearing away over the course of weeks or months, sometimes longer.

Doctors soon realized that the way pain pump manufacturers were instructing them to use the devices was never approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In fact, the FDA had rejected the use on more than one occasion, saying more tests needed to be conducted to determine the safety of such use.

Now hundreds of patients injured by the pain pumps are suing manufacturers of the pain pumps, insisting the companies should have done more to warn surgeons of the potential risks. Lawyers say the manufacturers disregarded patient safety in an effort to bolster sales, but pain pump manufacturers argue more research is needed to determine if the cases of chondrolysis were actually caused by pain pump use.

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