Hip replacement lawsuit

There is a pre-established notion that we live in a society that abuses its legal system when it comes to filing lawsuits against big companies. But claims aren’t always ridiculously petty or plain ridiculous, in fact, in most cases people have a justifiable reason to take the company to court, otherwise they wouldn’t even find legal representation in the first place.

A recent case that came up involves DePuy, a company that specializes in medical prosthetics and that is related to Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical and health giant. Controversy has struck the company when it was discovered that their hip replacement equipment – both the full hip replacement and the partial hip replacement prosthetic – was faulty. There is now a DePuy hip attourney class action lawsuit underway.

To fully understand the situation some explaining is required. When a health complication calls for a hip replacement surgery, the natural hip and the ball joint are replaced by artificial ones. Naturally, a certain level of risk is involved, but it’s not a great risk. The most common complication is that the friction between the two artificial parts creates debris that is rejected by the body, causing swelling and inflammation which requires a second surgery to solve. The degree varies from person to person, while also depending on the materials used. This was what happened with the DePuy equipment and there didn’t seem to be much cause for alarm until a study concluded that the percentage of people developing complications was much higher than normal – one out of every eight. With this new information, allied with reports that the company was aware of the problem for quite some time, led to the mentioned lawsuit.