North Carolina Product Liability Lawyer Blog
Here is a strange cause and effect: if you don’t keep your weight at healthy levels, you may unwittingly become a victim to a negligent manufacturer selling a defective medical device. Which ultimately means your weight gain may one day lead you to me and to becoming a plaintiff in defective product litigation.
It Works This Way:
Let’s say your job is intense and over the years you begin to neglect your physical fitness. As you get a little older, in this sedentary state, you begin to gain weight. Gaining weight makes you less willing or able to exercise and you gain even more weight. Soon you start to feel aches in your hip or maybe your knees. This pain, over time, gets worse. Finally you consult an orthopedic surgeon, who recommends a total hip or knee replacement. Because you are a trusting soul, and because the hip pain is getting worse, you schedule hip replacement surgery. At this surgery your doctor implants the latest metal-on-metal (MoM) artificial hip components. A year or two later a new kind of hip pain develops, and this hip pain gets severe quickly. Your surgeon does blood work and tells you that your metal levels have spiked in your body and–of yeah, one other thing–you also have a “recalled” artificial hip implanted and that it needs to come out. So you are now forced to undergo revision surgery, and you eventually find your way to me to file a lawsuit over the injuries you sustained from this defective medical device.
Weight Gain and Obesity Cause Health Problems
It’s no secret that weight gain causes all kinds of health problems. Doctors will tell you that substantial weight gain and obesity causes heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, gout, even sleep problems. Obesity is also the most common cause of joint discomfort. Obesity can lead to osteoarthritis and can pressure otherwise healthy joints; over time this added wear and tear can cause a person’s joint to breakdown, requiring hip replacement surgery, a surgery that may have been unnecessary if the person could have maintained a healthy weight. And that’s my point: if we can keep our weight at healthy levels, we can possibly avoid the unintended consequence of having a defective medical device implanted in our bodies.
No Shame or Blame
We are all vulnerable to weight gain. Years ago I was working too much, stopped exercising, and gained quite a bit of weight without even realizing what was happening. When I returned to exercise I was only able to walk on a treadmill for fifteen minutes. But soon I was running, lost twenty pounds in ninety days, and I have been able to keep the weight off ever since. So I get it: weight gain is one of the more insidious conditions of aging. It’s not easy to keep extra weight off, especially as we age and our metabolisms slow. But I would like to know how many defective product lawsuits would have been avoided if all those joint replacement surgeries made necessary by substantial weight gain could have been avoided.
The Takeaway?
If possible, keep exercising and keep your weight down. It could save you from all kinds of health problems and even from becoming a victim to a negligent company selling defective medical devices. In this age when device manufacturers are being more aggressive in rushing products to market, one sad result is that thousands and thousands of innocent people have been hurt by defective artificial hips, knees, and other medical devices. Don’t give these companies an opening to make you the next victim.