Medical Devices: Trusting the Experts May Not Work

Trust the experts. That’s the conventional wisdom, and most of us tend to follow conventional wisdom. Nothing is more reassuring than knowing that an expert team of doctors and nurses is providing care to our sick child. But sometimes even the experts aren’t aware of problems with the supplies their hospital is ordering.

Children’s Medical Ventures has been pressured by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to issue a Class 1 Recall of both its Gel-E Donut and Squishon 2 products. These products are used in hospital and rehabilitative settings to position a child (usually an infant) in just the way the provider needs to provide medication or therapy.

Parents were some of the first to notice a startling issue with these products. While watching caregivers work with their children, they noticed an odd substance on the equipment. Testing revealed the substance to be multiple varieties of molds, including some that are extremely dangerous to children with compromised immune systems or other health difficulties. These are the very types of children often placed on these devices.

It is impossible to know how many children were affected before the company did the right thing. As parents, we can’t trust that our children’s medical providers, no matter how well trained, will catch everything. It is up to us to:

• Monitor all treatments our child receives
• Ask any questions, even if the caregivers try to brush away or worries or make us feel like we are annoying them
• Inspect all medical equipment for signs of wear or other problems
• Research the effectiveness of the treatments being prescribed

If you or a loved one has been injured or become sick because of a faulty medical device, don’t hesitate to contact a lawyer. It often takes legal pressure for the FDA and a company to pull a dangerous product off the market, and anything we can do to hasten that process can save lives.