Billings Personal Injury Law Blog

Sharing the Montana roadway with teenagers is undeniably dangerous, both because teens are often prone to distraction and because they inherently lack driving experience. A teen driver can become even more of a highway hazard, however, if he or she is also actively texting behind the wheel, which is something teens across the nation continue to do at alarming rates. At the Law Firm of Edmiston & Colton, we recognize that teens who text and drive endanger not only themselves, but everyone else on the road, and we have helped many victims of teen-driver-involved car wrecks pursue appropriate recourse in their aftermath.

According to Reuters, one in three of today’s teenage drivers acknowledge that they text and drive, and safety advocates believe this number may be even higher in Montana and other states where teens can get driver’s licenses before age 16. In a survey involving more than 101,000 American teenage drivers, nearly 40 percent reported that they had texted behind the wheel, despite the fact that the vast majority of the teens surveyed came from states that banned the behavior for drivers under 21.

When you leave the pharmacy with your prescription or take your medication while staying in the hospital, you assume that you have been given the right medication that was prescribed by your physician. Sadly, this is not always the case. Medication errors occur at a surprising rate in Montana and across the United States. There are many opportunities for errors to occur during the prescription filling process, and if one mistake occurs, you may be sent home with the wrong medication.

There are several medical professionals involved in filling your prescription. First, the physician must order the medication, which is then called into the pharmacy by a medical assistant or written for you to take into the pharmacy. Next, the pharmacy technician must then enter in the prescription, which is checked by the pharmacist. During this tedious process, any of the following incidents may occur:

•          The physician orders the wrong medication for the patient
•          The medical assistant makes a mistake when calling in the prescription
•          The pharmacy misfills the prescription with the wrong medication
•          The wrong dosage of medication is prescribed and/or filled
•          The patient is given someone else’s prescription

If you had to move your parent to a Montana nursing home due to his or her age or deteriorating physical or mental condition, you undoubtedly worry about the quality of care (s)he receives there. Unfortunately, you may have just cause for your concerns.

Human Rights Watch recently investigated 15,000 nursing homes across the country, and the results are shocking. HRW discovered that in far too many instances, nursing homes routinely administer antipsychotic drugs, including Haloperidol, Seroquel and Risperidone, to patients whose physicians have neither prescribed such drugs nor diagnosed them with an illness, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, that requires such drugs. Instead, the nursing homes give these drugs to patients suffering from dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, etc. Why? So they can control these patients’ often uncooperative and combative behaviors.

Winter has arrived in Montana, and with it comes more automobile accidents. Unfortunately, you stand a good chance of becoming involved in one of them and the results could be catastrophic. For instance, if you injure your neck or back in your accident, you could sever your spinal cord and become paralyzed.

Brain and Spinal Cord explains that how much paralysis you could suffer depends on which of your following four spinal cord regions you injure:

1. Your cervical region: the base of your brain to the base of your neck
2. Your thoracic region: the bottom of your neck to your waist
3. Your lumbar region: your waist to your lower back
4. Your sacral region: your lower back to your coccyx a/k/a your tailbone