Cruise Ship Lawyers Blog
A Tampa doctor is under scrutiny and faces formal review from the Florida Department of Health after a patient who went to him for a cough and sore throat ended up in a 42-day coma.
The initial doctor’s visit happened in 2019 when the 75-year-old man said he had body aches, a cough and a sore throat. He returned 10 days later with “complaints of a deep cough” and “chest pains,” according to reporting from The Miami Herald. A complaint filed by the Florida Department of Health states that the doctor at the center of the incident did not examine the patient but prescribed prednisone, an Albuterol inhaler and Tramadol.
A lawsuit filed on behalf of the patient claims the doctor was not in the office that day and prescribed these medicines based on what he was told by an employee at the medical center. The patient returned a day later, complaining of increased chest pain. When he went to the hospital, two weeks after the first doctor’s visit, it was determined he had pneumonia and was in septic shock.
Doctors at the hospital put the man into a 42-day, medically-induced coma.
The doctor has a previous malpractice suit against him that followed the 2019 episode. That case was settled in 2022 with the doctor’s insurance paying $237,500.
Cruise Ship Incident
Earlier this summer, a woman relayed to news outlets her harrowing ordeal when she was abandoned by her cruise ship in a foreign country while sedated with no way of getting home. The Atlanta, Georgia, grandmother was on her way to the Bahamas with her husband when she noticed she was struggling to breathe. On day two of their cruise vacation, her lungs had filled with fluid and she collapsed on her way back to her cabin.
The woman was put on a ventilator by cruise ship doctors before she was dropped off at a hospital in the Dominican Republic where doctors denied her American insurance. The family was told that the medical transport to get the sedated woman back to the U.S. would cost $23,000 which they did not have.
Thankfully, the family was able to raise the money for an air ambulance via an online donation fund and the woman was transported to a Florida hospital. By then, her lungs had collapsed.
The inadequacies of the onboard cruise ship facility and its doctors to treat this woman’s medical emergency coupled with the ship abandoning her in a foreign country with no way of getting home while she was on a ventilator is shocking, though not uncommon. Leesfield & Partners, a law firm operating in a city with a port that has routinely been dubbed the “cruising capital of the world” has seen time and time again how these corporations fail sick and injured passengers.
Leesfield & Partners: A History of Representing Clients Against Cruise Lines
In its 48 years of representing sick and injured passengers, Leesfield & Partners attorneys have seen just how deep the ineptitude of cruise doctors can go. These doctors are advertised as leaders in their field and are purported to be capable experts. The reality, however, could not be further from the truth. One case handled by the firm involved a doctor Googling a patient’s symptoms to try and treat him after the medical team ignored a black box label on a medication they administered incorrectly to the patient. This case resulted in a $3,337,500 award for the man following the amputation of his arm.
While cruise lines may boast about the medical knowledge and experience of their onboard doctors, they are usually not up to par with U.S. standards. Many of the medical teams these cruises staff themselves with are not licensed to practice medicine in the United States.
Another issue is the competing interests of the patient’s well-being and the cruise line’s bottom line. Though medically necessary, patients who need to be evacuated will face opposition from the very medical professionals in charge of their care. Evacuations are costly as is diverting a ship’s course, causing scheduling issues and unhappy customers. In placing profit over the lives of passengers in medical emergencies, these ships are putting the sick and injured at risk.
One instance of this seen by the firm involves a man celebrating an anniversary on a cruise with his family when he had a heart attack in port. Though the man’s wife purchased evacuation insurance, the cruise line refused to evacuate him and instead left port to sail to Puerto Rico. He died 18 hours later. An evacuation could have saved him.
Attorneys with the firm secured a multi-million dollar recovery for the family in that case.
A 16-year-old suffering from a stroke was refused an evacuation by cruise doctors on their opinion that “16-year-olds don’t have strokes.” Cruise doctors maintained the mistaken opinion that the girl had a seizure disorder despite clear evidence that this was a stroke. A multi-million dollar settlement was secured by attorneys with the firm.
