The Star Chamber

This time from Stavanger. An 18 y/o male was committed to a mental institution in february, released in april. After this time he has - according to his mother - tried to kill himself four times. His mother - recently it seems, we are told "last week", tried to have him re-comitted, but was turned down (why? we are not told).
So now he has tried to murder an old lady with a spear.

The mother's rage is against the psychiatric clinic that turned him down. This rage is quite misdirected. She ought to direct is against the Norwegian Parliament, this august body has enacted a legislation that makes it impossible to forcibly commit somebody to a lunatic asylum unless the person is both raving mad and at the same time dangerous to other people - and both these circumstances must be proven; this makes it well-nigh impossible to commit anybody except those with blood already on their hands.

So dear mother, direct your rage against the politicians, and then against those who have elected them - of which you yourself is one and I am another - and seek your redress there.

Ok, here's another verdict from the Norwegian Supreme Court:

The plaintiff is a fifty-three y/o female nurse. She's had a goiter for years, and in 1998 she began developing problems with swallowing; so the opted for surgery.

The whole left lobe and most of the right lobe of the thyroid gland was removed. The operation was performed by a junior doctor (under training) and by a senior doctor (one of the most experienced endocrine surgeons in this country).

Befor the operation, the patient was informed that there was a high probability that she after the surgery would have to take Thyroxine tablets for the duration of her lifetime. She was also advised that there was a slight risk of damaging the recurrent laryngeal nerve.

She was not, however, advised that there was any risk of damage to the parathyreoid glands (for the non-medical reader, four tiny - match-head sized - glands more or less embedded in the posterior part of thyroid gland proper, their function is to regulate calcium and phosphate uptake and excretion).

What is more, in the written records of the operation the junior doctor specifically states that she has seen and "avoided" one of there parathyreoid glands. She does not, however, write anything about the other three.

So now Murphy's law comes into effect. The patient did develop hypocalcemia after the surgery. This hypocalcemia was so profound, that it was assessed that all her parathyreoid glands must have been damaged or removed during the surgery.

In the year 2000 the government gave her a full diability pension.

The NPE (the government's no-fault patient injury compensation institution) refused to compensate her for this loss of parathyreoid hormone during two appeals. So the matter went to court.

The genius in the system is, that when three, four or five independent medical experts have given their opinion (as happens in the NPE), and the plaintiff still isn't satisfied, she can go to the judge - with no medical knowledge at all - and get another verdict. So here goes:

In the lower court the NPE lost, and - in addition to a non-specified compensation to the plaintiff - had to pay her legal costs as well.

The case was appealed to the upper court: Again the NPE lost.

Why? Because - and there are lessons to be learned here - the records only mentioned one parathyreoid gland. Therefor the court decided that no attempt had been made to find the other three (that is, they couched their words somewhat, stating that is was highly improbable that they hadn't identified them, but that it was the written record that was the evidence, and they acted according to this only).

This is yet another example of what she shysters lawyers call "inverted burden of evidence" - that is, in cases of alleged medical malpractice, it is the defendant who must prove himself innocent, not the other way around.

Is this the case in other countries as well?

A few weeks ago, a man of middle Eastern origin shot his three sisters dead with a revolver. An open and shut case, he was found, the murder weapon was his, the three women had planned to to nasty things (like divorce and stuff like that, it carries the death penalty east of the Suez canal).

But the Board of Health thinks otherwise. The culprit has seen a psychiatrist some time before the murder, had refused to be admitted to the hospital and wasn't mad enough to be committed.

So now the Board of Health asked the Hospital for an account of its treatment of the killer-to-be. So they did, stating that "the man had received adequate treatment, and no errors had been done".

Brilliant! I sometimes use words like that myself when adressing the Gestapo Board of Health. But in this case, the local Heinrich Himmler Lavrentij Beria wasn't satisfied, so he asked for a second report.

Which he got, and over whose content he now is pondering, from time to time leaking farts into the press such as "Board of Health investigating X Hospital" (which is a blatant lie of course, he isn't investigating anything, he's reading reports).

I'll keep you posted. These last months more and more killers of foreign extraction see a shrink thhree weeks before the act, thus developing some sort of phony alibi. And the B of H is ready as always to pervert the cause of justice.

has reached a verdict.

The case is of a 59 y/o male with angina pectoris. In 2001 he had a cath done, during which the aorta was damaged. He developed a dissectional aneurysm and was operated one week later (by-pass no doubt, as he had triple-vessel disease, and probably the dissection was delt with also although the court papers doesn't specifically mention this).

Because of the dissection, the ECMO-cannula was placed in the radial artery. The patient developed a vascular injury here resulting in a thrombosis. This in turn has given him reduced strength in the hand.

So he reported the doctors who had saved his life to the no-fault compensation scheme - the NPE - to extort some money. They concluded that he had no claim. So he appealed, and was again rejected.

So he sued. In the lower court, he won; the goverment was ordered to give him compensation for the vascular injury and also to pay his legal costs.

The government appealed, in the upper court the decision was affirmed.

So the NPE appealed to the supreme court, and now the verdict is in; the plaintiff lost.

Even though the injury gives the plaintiff severe difficulties, I can not see that the level of injury is so great that this by itself can warrant compensation, when the injury is compared to the life-saving treatment that the plaintiff received

Or, translated (by me) into non-legal language:

The doctors saved his life and he is complaining about a sore thumb. He ought to be ashamed of himself.

All right, so maybe not all judges are assholes.