Prominent Dermatologist Practice in Montgomery County, Maryland Found Liable for Patient's Death

ROCKVILLE, Md., Nov. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- A jury has found a prominent dermatology practice in Montgomery County, Maryland liable for a patient's death from malignant melanoma and awarded damages to the patient's family of $5.8 million.

The verdict was against a dermatologist employed in the practice of Norman A. Lockshin, M.D., P.A., in Silver Spring, Md. Dr. Lockshin is a past president of the Washington, D.C. Dermatological Society. Dr. Lockshin was not found personally liable, but his professional corporation will have to pay the damages on behalf of its former employee who was found responsible for the patient's death. That employee is Michael Albert, M.D., who now lives in Woodbridge, Connecticut.

The patient was Richard Semsker, a Rockville, Maryland attorney. Mr. Semsker died at age 47 in October 2007, leaving a widow and two children.

The verdict was returned late on Friday, November 14, in the courtroom of Judge John Debelius in Montgomery County Circuit Court. The jury had deliberated for one day after hearing five days of evidence.

In September 2004, Mr. Semsker went to Dr. Lockshin's office to have some painful boils on his upper back examined and to have a full body skin check. It was Dr. Albert's first day on the job as a part-time moonlighting employee. His full-time job at the time was as a medical officer for dermatologic drugs for the Food & Drug Administration in Rockville.

Dr. Albert's examination documented two cysts and an atypical mole (technically known as a "nevus") on Mr. Semsker's upper back, all of which he recommended be removed, plus a mole on his lower back which Dr. Albert recommended for monitoring. Mr. Semsker returned to the dermatology office four times over the next two months in the fall of 2004 to have the other growths removed from his back. The untreated mole on the lower back turned into a melanoma sometime over the next two years.

When Mr. Semsker returned to the dermatology office in August 2006, shortly after his wife noticed that the mole had turned color, it was excised by Dr. Benjamin Lockshin, the son of the office's founder, Norman Lockshin. Shortly afterward, it was found that the cancer had traveled to dozens of lymph nodes in the patient's groin and lower abdomen. Mr. Semsker underwent numerous treatments, including radiation, surgery and experimental chemotherapy with interleukin, but the cancer eventually traveled to his brain, and he died in October 2007.

The Semsker family filed a lawsuit against Dr. Lockshin, his practice, Dr. Albert, and Mr. Semsker's primary care doctor. The primary doctor reached a confidential settlement with the family during the trial. Dr. Lockshin documented the same mole as 6 millimeters in diameter in 1998, at which time he wrote a letter to the primary doctor recommending it be removed. Then in 2004, when Dr. Albert saw the patient, he measured the lower back mole as 13mm in diameter, but did not realize the mole had doubled in size in the past six years, because Dr. Lockshin in the meantime had purged his files of old records. A copy of Dr. Lockshin's 1998 letter was found in the file of the primary doctor, who also did not realize the mole had doubled in size because he never compared the two letters he received from the dermatology office about the mole.

The family alleged that Dr. Albert should have removed the lower back mole even if he did not know it had increased in size, because it was still of a worrisome size and the patient was already scheduled to have, and did have, another mole and two cysts removed from the back during that same fall of 2004.

Dr. Albert asserted that he had treated the patient appropriately, but he announced from the witness stand during trial that he had left the practice of medicine because of the lawsuit and was planning to become a high school biology teacher in Connecticut. He had trained at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

The family called as an expert witness a prominent melanoma researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. John Kirkwood, M.D., who testified that Mr. Semsker would have had a 95 percent chance of a complete cure if the mole had been removed in the fall of 2004, but that the subsequent two-year delay in removal allowed the cancer to travel from the skin into the bloodstream and become incurable. Dr. Kirkwood testified that nearly all the advances in patient survival of melanoma over the last fifty years have been due to early detection and removal of worrisome moles.

Melanoma is a cancer of the cells that produce melanin, the pigment that colors the skin. According to the American Cancer Society, about 62,000 Americans are diagnosed each year with melanoma, and about 8,000 die from the disease.

The family was represented at trial by Patrick Malone of Patrick Malone & Associates, P.C., in Washington, D.C., and Jon Thornton of Pierce & Thornton, in Norfolk, Virginia.

The family sued Dr. Lockshin personally because of his destruction of his old records, which would have informed Dr. Albert that the mole had doubled in size and was not a stable congenital mole as he assumed. The jury found that Dr. Lockshin was not liable because he had kept the records for the minimum five years required by Maryland law. The American Medical Association ethics code advises doctors to retain medical records as long as they may be of "reasonable value" to a patient. Dr. Lockshin testified that he was not aware of the AMA ethics code when he destroyed the records.

"Mr. Semsker's doctors had six years to remove this mole when it was completely curable," said the Semskers' attorney Patrick Malone. "If they had paid attention he would be alive today. This was a patient who fell through the cracks of the medical system because of poor communication among his doctors."

    Contact for further information:
    Patrick Malone
    Patrick Malone & Associates, P.C.
    1331 H Street N.W.
    Washington, D.C. 20005
    202-742-1500
    pmalone@patrickmalonelaw.com
    www.Patrickmalonelaw.com