A lawsuit from advice dispensed over e-mail:
In one case, an interventional radiologist gave advice to a 65-year-old woman who had selected the “contact us” option on the practice’s website. The woman had written that her doctor recommended a vertebroplasty because radiographs of the lumbar spine showed diffuse osteoporosis and a collapsed third lumbar vertebra. The radiologist responded that he, too, recommended the procedure. An orthopedic surgeon performed the vertebroplasty, complications ensued, and the patient became paraplegic. The resulting lawsuit alleged that the radiologist had “negligently advised” the woman to undergo vertebroplasty “without conducting physical examination and medical testing that would have disclosed the presence of metastatic cancer.”
