Re: Reading X-Rays In Asbestos Suits Enriched Doctor
From: zygote@icsi.net
Wed Nov 30 19:00:00 2005
the original opinion is from the south Texas fed court and the opinion is 258 pp or so
long and little kicks posterior of P atty for their frivolous suits etc. Certainly Harron was
vital cog in the process. For that loss of licensure is appropriate cure.
On 29 Nov 2005 at 9:21, Dean Huffman . wrote:
Date sent: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 09:21:30 -0600
Send reply to: ob-gyn-l@obgyn.net
From: "Dean Huffman ." <dean@thehuffpeople.net>
To: Multiple recipients of list OB-GYN-L <ob-gyn-l@dns.obgyn.net>
Subject: Reading X-Rays In Asbestos Suits Enriched Doctor
> .
>
> Reading X-Rays in Asbestos Suits Enriched Doctor
>
> NY Times, November 29, 2005
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/29/business/29asbestos.html?hp&ex=1133326800&e
n²c1654b6cafb25e&eiP94&partner=homepage
>
> BRIDGEPORT, W.Va. - About a decade ago, a radiologist in this small town
> gradually stopped seeing patients and instead adopted what turned out to be a
> much more lucrative practice: reading X-rays full time.
>
> Skip to next paragraph
>
> Dr. Ray A. Harron, a physician, stopped seeing patients over the last decade.
> Instead, he made a lucrative business of interpreting X-rays.
>
> Rand Corporation Report on the History of Asbestos Litigation (pdf)
>
> Testimony of Ray A. Harron The doctor, Ray A. Harron, now 73 years old, reviewed
> as many as 150 X-rays a day, or one every few minutes, and produced medical
> reports for $125 each. Some of his reports supported claims by more than 75,000
> people seeking compensation for lung injury caused by inhalation of asbestos.
> For his work, he probably earned millions of dollars over the years.
>
> Plaintiffs' lawyers who have used Dr. Harron's services recently did not return
> phone calls seeking comment. But in the eyes of defense lawyers fighting some
> of those claims, Dr. Harron was not a professional rendering an independent
> opinion, but a vital cog in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit machine. They contend
> that Dr. Harron's X-ray evaluations are unreliable at best, fraudulent at
> worst.
>
> The defense lawyers are not the only ones who have questioned Dr. Harron's work.
> This summer, a federal judge found that Dr. Harron "failed to write, read, or
> personally sign" reports supporting 6,350 claims by people saying they had
> inhaled silica, another potentially dangerous material.
>
> Congressional investigators are now looking into asbestos and silica litigation.
> Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are also looking into asbestos claims, and
> while it is not clear whether they are looking at Dr. Harron's work, they have
> sought documents from a medical screening company that used his services and
> from others involved in asbestos and related litigation.
>
> Dr. Harron has not been formally accused of wrongdoing. In depositions and court
> appearances he has not acknowledged any wrongdoing and has defended his work.
>
> The spotlight on Dr. Harron's work comes at a time when critics of plaintiffs'
> lawyers have portrayed the sweeping product liability litigation over asbestos
> and silica as an effort to game a system set up to compensate injured workers.
> Defense lawyers have criticized expert witnesses and diagnosing doctors in the
> past for supporting lawsuits that the lawyers say lack merit.
>
> While Dr. Harron rarely appeared in court, his medical reports were clearly
> crucial to tens of thousands of claims. Court documents in the asbestos and
> silica litigation show the critical role that can be played by doctors, who are
> less often maligned than the lawyers who hire them.
>
> "This is the tip of the iceberg," said Walter G. Watkins Jr., a lawyer at Forman
> Perry Watkins Krutz & Tardy, a firm in Jackson, Miss., that has defended
> companies facing asbestos claims and silica claims. "There are a lot of other
> Ray Harrons out there."
>
> Through a lawyer, Lawrence Goldman of New York, Dr. Harron declined to comment
> for this article.
>
> Litigation involving asbestos, and more recently, silica, has grown into a huge
> business. Over the last 30 years, more than 700,000 claims have been filed
> involving inhalation of asbestos, a fire-retardant material that can cause a
> particularly pernicious form of lung cancer, and more than $70 billion has been
> spent on asbestos litigation - $49 billion as compensation, according to the
> Rand Corporation.
>
> Dr. Harron, corporate defense lawyers say, had some role in providing medical
> documents supporting thousands of claims against other companies that made or
> used asbestos.
>
> As Dr. Harron stepped up his involvement in screening potential asbestos
> claimants, he began to travel and was around Bridgeport less and less, said Dr.
> Douglas McKinney, a urologist who said he had kept a practice in Bridgeport for
> nearly 20 years. "He started doing this evaluation business and he was very
> seldom around," said Dr. McKinney, adding that he saw Dr. Harron only three or
> four times a year.
>
> But Dr. McKinney said he was baffled when he learned from a newspaper article of
> challenges to some of Dr. Harron's work in asbestos and silica litigation. "I
> was surprised at that, because he had always had a straightforward business
> here," Dr. McKinney said. "I sent him a lot of my business for routine X-rays
> and ultrasounds and such."
>
> Dr. Harron is not an active member of the county medical association, according
> to the organization's executive secretary. A few local residents who said they
> knew him and tenants in the two, two-story blue-sided office buildings he owns,
> on a small plaza called Harron Square off the two-lane road that runs through
> town, said only that he was a nice man.
>
> A 1999 court decision gives some idea of the nature of Dr. Harron's work. He was
> sued by the widow of Raymond Adams, whose lung cancer Dr. Harron had spotted
on
> an X-ray. Dr. Harron, who had never met the man, drew the possible cancer to
> the attention of the law firm that had sent him the X-ray as part of its search
> for potential plaintiffs in asbestos lawsuits. The firm never passed on the
> information to Mr. Adams, according to court documents, and his cancer went
> undiagnosed for about a year. He eventually died.
>
> Skip to next paragraph
> Rand Corporation Report on the History of Asbestos Litigation (pdf)
>
> Testimony of Ray A. Harron The court found that Dr. Harron was not Mr. Adams's
> doctor and so did not have a duty to make sure he sought medical treatment.
>
> The distinction between a person's doctor and an independent litigation expert
> is critical for Dr. Harron, and it is one that he has mentioned repeatedly in
> depositions taken by defense lawyers over the years.
>
> According to the transcript of a deposition in 2004 , Dr. Harron graduated from
> New York Medical College in 1957, completed an internship at the United States
> Marine Hospital in New York in 1958, was a radiology resident in New Orleans
> and then moved to West Virginia in 1961, where he practiced as a radiologist
> for more than 30 years.
>
> Beginning in the mid-1990's, he stopped treating patients and began reading
> X-rays and identifying possible cases of dust-related diseases. In 1994 his
> medical reports supported fewer than 2,000 claims to one of the oldest trusts
> set up to compensate asbestos victims, the Manville trust. In the next year
> that number grew to more than 6,000; he averaged about 6,400 reports each year
> thereafter.
>
> "The dog died and the kids left home," Dr. Harron said in the 2004 deposition.
> "My responsibilities were over, so I kind of gave up real medical work."
>
> He devoted himself nearly full-time to reading X-ray films. Sometimes, Dr.
> Harron said, he would conduct a physical examination. Usually he also received
> a medical history, completed by an employee of a screening company, that would
> include a statement that the person was exposed to asbestos. Dr. Harron said he
> relied mostly on the X-ray review, not on the history.
>
> Screening companies have portable X-ray equipment that they can set up in hotel
> ballrooms or in other temporary locations. Some days, Dr. Harron would review
> more than 100 X-rays a day, he said during his deposition. He charged $125 an
> evaluation, but would also charge a flat fee - perhaps $10,000 - if he had to
> travel to a faraway screening site, in California or Hawaii, for example. If he
> had charged $125 per medical report for the 76,224 claims submitted to the
> Manville trust, Dr. Harron would have made more than $9.5 million from those
> claims alone.
>
> If Dr. Harron found the X-ray's findings were consistent with signs of
> asbestos-related illness, he said he would dictate a report to his staff, who
> would then stamp it with his signature, he said. The report, along with the
> other documentation, would be provided to the law firm that had hired the
> screening company and Dr. Harron. The law firms would file the report with a
> claim seeking compensation for asbestos-related injury.
>
> Dr. Harron's son, Andrew Harron, a doctor in Kenosha, Wis., has also read
> X-rays. The Manville trust announced in September that it would no longer pay
> claims based on reports by Dr. Harron or his son, as well as several other
> doctors whose work has been questioned by defense lawyers.
>
> Jed Stone, a lawyer for Andrew Harron, said that defense lawyers' attacks on
> doctors were "an attempt by the manufacturing industries to close down"
> litigation over diseases caused by exposure to asbestos and silica.
>
> "For years they settled these asbestos cases, and now they want to open them up
> again," Mr. Stone said. "I don't get a do-over in my life," and neither should
> the companies battling asbestos claims, he added.
>
> In a video recording of the 2004 deposition, the elder Dr. Harron strongly
> rejected the suggestion that he had any incentive to find signs of
> asbestos-related injury in the people whose X-rays he reviewed.
>
> "I get paid the same no matter what I say," he added.
>
> But Dr. Harron's credibility suffered a serious blow in the course of a legal
> proceeding in Corpus Christi, Tex., before Judge Janis Graham Jack of Federal
> District Court.
>
> Dr. Harron testified about his diagnoses of silicosis, a lung disease caused by
> exposure to silica, a hard, glassy mineral used as a cleaning abrasive as well
> as in making glass, paint, ceramics and other materials. The doctor's diagnoses
> supported thousands of claims filed against companies that manufactured or used
> silica.
>
> Judge Jack wrote that the diagnoses relied on X-rays and on medical histories
> taken by screening companies or law firms, not on physical examinations, as the
> reports under his name claimed.
>
> Most disturbing, though, was another finding by the judge. "When Dr. Harron
> first examined 1,807 plaintiffs' X-rays for asbestos litigation," Judge Jack
> wrote, "he found them all to be consistent only with asbestosis and not with
> silicosis." But after re-examining X-rays of the same 1,807 people "for silica
> litigation, Dr. Harron found evidence of silicosis in every case."
>
> It is possible for someone to have developed both diseases as a result of
> working in a place where both silica and asbestos were used. But both illnesses
> generally take years to manifest themselves, so it is unlikely that someone
> could develop signs of silicosis that were not discernible on an X-ray just a
> few years earlier. The diagnoses "were manufactured for money," the judge wrote
> last summer in an opinion that sent some claims back to state courts and imposed
> sanctions on one of the plaintiff firms. "The record does not reveal who
> originally devised this scheme, but it is clear that the lawyers, doctors and
> screening companies were all willing participants," Judge Jack wrote.
>
> When defense lawyers began to ask Dr. Harron about his findings in February at a
> hearing that led to Judge Jack's opinion, he asked for a lawyer.
>
> "If you're accusing me of fabricating these things, I think that's a serious
> charge," Dr. Harron said.
>
Robert J. Carpenter, Jr. MD
6624 Fannin, #2720
Houston, TX 77030
(O) 713-795-4600
(F) 713-795-4422
"Life is difficult"
The Road Less Travelled
by Scott Peck
