Lawyer questions data cited by oral surgeon
Malpractice trial now in its sixth week
A lawyer in the malpractice trial of Spokane oral surgeon Dr. Patrick Collins challenged Collins’ claim that he has an 86 percent success rate for a series of open jaw surgeries he performed through 1999.
In testimony last week in the Spokane County Superior Court jury trial, Collins said his office used data from his group practice in a published study that concluded 86 percent of 117 responding patients who’d agreed to have jaw surgery reported good results.
In cross-examination Monday, plaintiff’s attorney Mary Schultz said it would be impossible to get that high a success rate with only 117 responses from 202 patients contacted.
Some 31 patients of the 117 who responded reported bad outcomes, amounting to a 26.5 percent failure rate instead of the 14 percent failure rate Collins claimed in his study, Schultz said.
Collins explained his data-crunchers assumed that the former patients who didn’t respond to the survey had no negative results.
“We thought it was more likely than not that they were satisfied,” Collins said.
Collins also said he personally treated 17 of the 31 patients with bad outcomes in the dental practice, and 11 of them had ended up with prosthetic jaw joints.
The data came from patients treated from 1985 through 1999 and don’t count any surgical failures from 2000 to the present – including plaintiff Kimberly Kallestad – according to Collins’ responses.
When Collins said he’d had no other adverse results in jaw joint surgery since 2000, Schultz introduced the name of another woman Collins has treated whose jaw fused shut.
The court battle over the jaw surgery data is important because Schultz will try to introduce evidence of additional negative outcomes in her rebuttal case this week against Collins, accused of disabling 29-year-old Kallestad in a series of jaw surgeries in 2000 and 2001. Superior Court Judge Michael Price hasn’t yet ruled on how much additional testimony from other former patients will be allowed.
Kallestad testified that Collins reassured her he’d never had a bad outcome – an assertion he denies.
Under questioning from his lawyer, John Versnel III, Collins blamed Kallestad’s increasingly painful complications on the fact that her body generated new bone that fused her jaw shut, plus “some psychological factors that got worse” as he proceeded with a series of four surgeries plus steroid injections in 2000 and 2001.
Versnel asked Collins when he’d first heard of the Kallestad family’s dissatisfaction with his care of their oldest daughter.
“When I was served with this lawsuit in September 2004,” the dentist replied.
“Did your treatment fall below the standard of care?” Versnel asked.
“Absolutely not. … Bad results can happen. It’s part of the risks of the procedure,” Collins replied.
Collins also said he believes Kallestad’s jaw can be fixed in an in-hospital rehabilitation program followed by total joint reconstruction and a 700-rad blast of radiation in each jaw joint that would prevent new bone from forming.
Kallestad’s lawyers are seeking up to $8.6 million in lost wages, future medical costs and home care, saying she’s so disabled she’ll need intensive care for the rest of her life. Defense experts have made similar but lower calculations of up to $5.4 million should the jury return a verdict in Kallestad’s favor.
The trial, now in its sixth week, is expected to go to the jury by Wednesday.