THE DePUY ASR HIP REPLACEMENT DEVICE: YOUR RIGHTS

THE DePUY ASR HIP REPLACEMENT DEVICE RECALLED:
YOUR RIGHTS

Mark S. Cornwall, is resuming his 25 years of litigation practice in the field of personal injury solely to help those persons who have been victimized by failed hip surgery replacement devices. In August 2010, the DePuy (pronounced like Pepe “Lepeu”) Orthopedics, a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson, recalled 93,000 defective implants, on a so called voluntary basis.

The two hip replacement devices recalled are known as the ASR Hip Recurring System and the ASR XL Acetabluor System, commonly referred to as ASR.

If you have had your hip replaced due to the ASR failing and/or have had it replaced with another device due to the failure of the ASR between 2003 to the present, please, call the Law Office of Mark S. Cornwall to understand your legal rights on pursuing your claim. Talk to your treating physician about how the recall of the ASR and the possibilities of its flaking off titanium chips into your blood stream can affect you.

Johnson and Johnson recalled this replacement hip because the devices have a 12% chance of coming loose, fracturing the bone around the implant and causing tumors, as well as metal particles into your blood stream.

A 12% failure rate is astronomic in the world of recalls. A 5% failure rate would be more than sufficient. Johnson and Johnson has admitted it is to blame, but this knowledge of failure has been known for years before now, and they DePuy has kept selling them at the expense of their patients pain, e.g. the disappointment of its failed surgery, months of rehabilitation, the need for a replacement surgery, time, expense, lost wages, and in many cases years of never ending hip pain, requiring cortisone shots, every three months that did not work. Because of the ASR never working for many patients it has made life more miserable both before and after the replacement surgery knowing you would have to have your hip replaced again, and start the rehab process from the beginning again. It is always more difficult to mend the second time, but the relief is worth it.

The Law Office of Mark S. Cornwall has a history of winning lawsuits against the biggest manufacturing and retail corporations in American: Harley Davidson, Big Five Sporting Goods, both United and KLM Airlines, and McDonalds to name a few. But they all have insurance companies and without exception they do not want to pay you a dime.

DePuy has sold more than 93,000 of these and similar products worldwide, with sales totaling more than $5.4 billion in 2009. In December of that year they stopped selling the implants in the Nation of Australia due to complaints from hip plant receivers where hip replacement is common since the average person in Australia walks the most steps per day in the world. America is last on that list. In March of 2010, the company wrote letters to all orthopedists warning doctors of the possibility of early failure of their products.

Then on August 26, 2010, they sent orthopedists an “Alert Letter” warning doctors that use of the implant could result in failure due to problems in the device itself. That is almost an admission, but it is not what they are blaming this voluntary recall on. They are blaming it on 1) the way the doctors placed the system during surgery, and 2) they claim they were taking it off the market anyway because its sales were not making money for DePuy aka Johnson & Johnson.

“Johnson & Johnson announced the recall of the DePuy ASR Hip Implant system after data from the National Joint Registry of England and Wales showed that 1 out of every 8 patients (12%-13%) who had received the recalled devices had to undergo revision surgery within five years of receiving it. It is suppose tp work for 15 years. The recall involved the ASR XL Acetabular System, a hip socket used in traditional hip replacement, and the ASR Hip Resurfacing System, a partial hip replacement that involves placing a metal cap on the ball of the femur. Only the ASR XL Acetabular System was approved for use in the US.
According to a report on the Independent, a UK media outlet, the Australian Joint Registry – the second largest database in the world after the England and Wales National Joint Registry – issued seven reports to DePuy starting in 2007 that identified problems with the hip implant system. The ASR system was finally withdrawn from the Australian market in December 2009.
Professor Stephen Graves, director of the Australian National Joint Replacement Registry, told the Independent that DePuy had behaved “irresponsibly and very badly,” putting patients needlessly at risk. “It is a complete untruth that DePuy did not have reason to withdraw the ASR before now; we have been telling them since 2007, but they allowed it to be used on thousands of people,” Graves said,” according to the Registry.

Mark S. Cornwall 1 (805)845-7558