(May 25, 2018) Cook Medical must pay $1.2 million to compensate a man who was implanted with a Cook Celect IVC filter, said a Texas jury Thursday. Following a three-week trial, the jury of 12 ruled Cook must pay for injuries following a Celect filter’s implantation in Jeffrey Pavlock on March 3, 2015. A 35-year-old Houston-area firefighter, Mr. Pavlock sued Cook after its Celect inferior vena cava filter became stuck inside him and required open laparotomy surgery to remove.
Cook promoted its Celect IVC filter as retrievable, but the filter put into Mr. Pavlock’s inferior vena cava tilted, perforated his IVC, duodenum and aorta, and was pressing against his spine and renal artery. That situation made it impossible to remove without major surgery. Two previous removal procedures had failed.
Much conjecture from both sides argued about how much the results of the removal surgery affected Mr. Pavlock now and could affect him in the future. For the present, despite the scar hidden beneath the button-down shirts he favored during the trial, the appearance of the burly firefighter and EMT appeared unremarkable. He moved freely throughout the proceedings, without any apparent pain or visible injury, in full view of the jury just a few feet away.
One plaintiff’s expert in the case testified that Mr. Pavlock had a 90% chance of suffering future spinal stenosis from the surgery which involved cutting the metal filter into several pieces and digging them out.
”Spinal stenosis,” according to the Mayo Clinic, “is a narrowing of the spaces within your spine, which can put pressure on the nerves that travel through the spine. Spinal stenosis occurs most often in the lower back and the neck. Some people with spinal stenosis may not have symptoms.”
Defense pounced on the Plaintiff side’s analysis that any spinal stenosis Mr. Pavlock may have is asymptomatic for now but could become symptomatic in the future. Nobody could say for certain whether or not Mr. Pavlock would suffer symptomatic stenosis in the future.
Attorney David Matthews argued for the plaintiff in closing that Cook knew its Celect had perforation problems before it was cleared by the FDA, yet pushed it to the market anyway. He showed the jury several independent studies which found Celect had a perforation rate of greater than 79 percent, while the Cook-sponsored study the company presented to the FDA prior to Celect’s 510(k) clearance in 2008 showed a zero percent perforation rate. Mr. Matthews also reminded the jury that he had showed evidence that as few as one percent of adverse events are reported by doctors to a medical device company.
Concerning the large gap between independent- and Cook-sponsored study findings, defense attorney John Mandler said, “They have their favorite studies and we have ours.” Cook’s lawyers had also refuted trial evidence of doctors reporting only 1-5% of actual adverse events related to medical devices. In closing, Mr. Mandler called the low-reporting evidentiary studies a “conspiracy theory.”
Cook issued a press release the next day vowing to appeal the jury verdict.
Cook Medical loses $1.2 Million IVC Filter Verdict
Freese & Goss and Matthews & Associates Law Firm represented the plaintiff. Cook Medical was represented by Faegre Baker Daniels of Minneapolis. The actual jury award was $1,240,500.
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- IVC Filter Lawsuit| Lawyer
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by Matthews & Associates
