Wade Byrd gave $100,000 in soft-money to John Edwards, and a personal-injury attorney at his firm was named chairman of the North Carolina Democratic Party, but Byrd failed to follow in Edwards’s footsteps in a recent cerebral palsy case when a jury that had sat through the five-week trial found for all of the defendants after an hour of deliberation. Byrd had sought $30 million from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, two doctors, and a nurse who had the bad fortune to be present when Joseph O’Hara was born with severe brain damage. Though O’Hara had lesions on his placenta, and though there’s no relationship between C-sections and cerebral palsy rates, Byrd tried to claim that the fetal heart rate monitor showed wrongdoing. (James Romoser, “Doctors found not liable in baby’s brain damage”, Winston-Salem Journal, Nov. 23).

In other cerebral palsy litigation news, a clever group has reserved the web-domain AskTheDoc.org, and must be paying a fortune to advertise on Google for “cerebral palsy” search terms. While masquerading as medical advice (and the website does have some rudimentary resources), the website encourages parents of children born with cerebral palsy to believe that most cerebral palsy is caused by malpractice. It’s not clear if trial lawyers are behind the website (as they are with this similar site that fails to distinguish between “it’s” and “its” and is registered in the same state with a similar IP address), or if it’s just a spam source. The latter website gives some “indicators” that “a medical mistake may have caused your child’s cerebral palsy,” including “a specialist was called to care for your newborn.”

Filed under: John Edwards, medical, North Carolina