If you or a loved one are suffering from an illness where a specific medication is required to help treat the condition, then you may want to look into the side effects that can come with the pharmaceutical product you are being prescribed. Unfortunately, while these drugs are intended to help you, there are plenty of instances when these medications can instead cause serious harm to both your health and quality of life.
When you consider the health issues associated with taking a defective drug, the medical care you must seek in order to treat any unexpected side effects and the accompanying bills, as well as the emotional and mental strain, the repercussions of taking a defective drug can be catastrophic.
If you or family member has suffered irreversible and permanent tearing as the result of being treated with the breast cancer chemotherapy drug, Taxotere, you may feel lost and uncertain – but there is hope.
With the outstanding legal support of Hotze Runkle PLLC, you have a great shot for justice. Our team of Houston Taxotere lawsuit attorneys and national litigators have the skills, diligence, and means to help you secure the compensation you need for your injuries caused by the defective drug – in this particular case – Taxotere.
How Texas Handles Defective Drug Lawsuits: The Laws That Govern Them
Pharmaceutical-based product liability lawsuits (also referred to as “bad drug lawsuits”) while not too different from personal injury cases, do have a few significant aspects that set them apart in Texas.
Depending on your specific circumstances, there are three means by which you will be able to file your claim:
- If the drug was not designed properly
- If something went wrong in the manufacturing process of the drug
- There was a failure to properly inform consumers of the drug’s side effects
To further explain these concepts, there is considered to be an error in the design of the drug if it is exceedingly dangerous even when being properly used. However, it is a rare case that these types of claims are filed because most dangerous drugs are generally not approved by the United States Food & Drug Administration (FDA).
In other instances, a drug can be designed properly, but something may happen during the manufacturing process that makes the drug no longer safe to use. A common example of this would be a drug that gets contaminated by a harmful component in the process of being manufactured.
Failure to properly advertise is a reasonable claim to file since Texas adopted the learned intermediary doctrine, which means that in some cases, the manufacturer fails to meet their obligation to provide adequate warnings to consumers and the prescribing physicians.
Who Can Be Held Liable and Why?
The drug manufacturer, your doctor, your pharmacy, and even testing laboratories can be held liable. Here’s why:
- Drug manufacturers can be held responsible for defects in manufacturing, defects in design, or inadequate marketing.
- Your doctor may be held liable for your injuries if they gave you the wrong medication or failed to properly inform you of the side effects, while your pharmacy – or even the pharmacists – can be guilty of filling the wrong medication or providing an improper dosage.
- Drugs have to go through a set of tests before they can be approved, so if one of the testing laboratories made an error and allowed an unsafe drug into the market, the laboratories can be to blame for your injuries.
Don’t Wait to File Your Claim Against Taxotere – Act Now!
In the state of Texas, you have two (2) years to file a product liability claim or a defective drug claim. If you fail to meet that time limit, it is more likely that the Texas civil court system will deny your claim.
However, please be aware that the statute of limitations varies from state to state. Should you be unable to file your claim in Texas, you may have the opportunity to file in another state. Your lawyer should be able to provide you additional information regarding this.
Some injuries are more difficult to detect and may go unnoticed for years following the injury. For example, Taxotere users didn’t suffer excessive tearing after their first treatment but began to develop the issue after constant exposure.
It is crucial to seek out legal guidance as soon as you start to notice any pain or discomfort or signs of the product being defective. It is important that you start the process of filing a claim against the makers of Taxotere sooner rather than later.