Not to put too fine a point on it – “missing the diagnosis” may have been pretty reasonable here,
if the patient had normal blood pressures, no history of stroke, and couldn’t move his facial muscles up top as well as below…..but there may have been a failure to communicate the smaller possibility of a particular kind of stroke.The danger is a small stroke in the brain stem can mimic Bell’s palsy. My guess is the patient wasn’t warned of this possibility, and went on to have another event, was throwing clots or something – and he ended up much worse off than if his stroke had been identified before the followup event. Impossible to know, of course, without any access to records. The doctor may have insisted it was Bell’s, to the exclusion of explaining the possibility of taking action to rule out the brainstem or basilar artery stroke, or of a new event occurring, or what to watch for, etc.

It’s hard to tell what really went on in court with that atrocious reporting, and of course, nothing but the most cursory account of events, there isn’t a really clear picture of what exactly happened to the patient.

The top post is a bit of a botch all around. There seems to be no verdict against the doctor at all.

It’s as difficult to tell if a doctor committed malpractice from a newspaper article as it is to tell if a jury got it right.

It could have been a situation where the cases were submitted on interrogatories, and the jury thought they had to answer them all when they could have stopped after the first with regard to negligence.

I suspect the outcome would be the same regardless of whether the diagnosis of stroke or Bell’s was made at that time.

And, Dr. Furst, what exactly is the treatment for ischemic stroke, and to what degree or probability would that treatment be beneficial?

If doctors cannot control their hyperventilation, how can we expect it of the patient?