Should Surgeries Come With Warranties?
How would you feel if you had undergone a major surgery, only to find a couple of years down the road that the medical device implanted during the surgery was causing a renewed round of pain and tissue damage? This has been the experience of thousands of individuals who had hip replacement surgery in the past decade. DePuy Orthapaedic’s ASR Hip Replacement and Resurfacing Systems have been found to fail at an alarming rate of up to 13%. Worse yet is the fact that it took the company several years to issue the DePuy hip recall, despite strong evidence that the systems were flawed. To top it all off, patients who have been implanted with the faulty device now face a painful second surgery and another long recovery. No doubt DePuy and its parent company Johnson & Johnson will hear from plenty of irate consumers on the coming months and years.