Atlanta Personal Injury Lawyer Blog
Guidant had an idea to develop an implantable cardiac defibrillator that captured the world by storm, but ended up in a nasty recall of 7 models of their medical product.
Guidant, who is now under the wing of Boston Scientific, took off like a rocket when they first brought out their implantable cardiac defibrillators. When they started to fail and the products were recalled, the company took a nose dive in public confidence, not to mention it became the target of widespread lawsuits for marketing defective medical products.
Guidant began life as a small company in 1972 and was successful enough that Eli Lilly bought them out in 1978. Their specialty was finely crafted cardiac defibrillators, and they continued making them without a problem until 2005 when there were 26 reported cases of their product failing. Rumors abounded that the company had known about the problem prior to 2005 yet did nothing about it.
2005 was a bad year for Guidant as they issued safety advisories regarding 7 models of their defibrillators and also had to advise doctors to discontinue using 4 of those models. The disaster knew no bounds when another nine models were called into question in subsequent weeks. The problem was tracked to 3 models of the Guidant defibrillators where the insulation on the wiring shorted out.
Finding this out is one thing, doing something about it was another, and nothing was done in terms of halting production or recalling the defective medical products. The company actually continued to sell them and tried to fix the short-out problem in later versions of their product. Evidently, other problems also surfaced at the same time, but this time included memory-programming errors. By the time these errors were exposed, over 50,000 people had the potential to be affected by this defective medical product.
Cardiac defibrillators are used for patients with ventricular fibrillation and irregular heartbeats that sometimes cause the heart to quit. Defibrillators need to be absolutely top quality to prevent fibrillation and death.
The problem is that although there have been lawsuits filed against Guidant; there are still patients out there with potential time bombs implanted in their chests. While it’s a patient’s decision to have one replaced, the process is risky and expensive.
If you or a loved one has one of the potentially defective Guidant cardiac defibrillators implanted, contact a defective medical product attorney and discuss your case.
Tim Anderson works with Atlanta Personal Injury attorney, Stephen M. Ozcomert. The firm specializes in personal injury, malpractice, motorcycle accidents, and wrongful death. To learn more about Atlanta personal injury lawyer, Stephen M. Ozcomert or Atlanta personal injury, Atlanta personal injury lawyer, Atlanta personal injury attorney, visit Ozcomert.com.