This case study examines how medical negligence — specifically, the repeated failure to investigate a dangerous secondary cause of headache — led to a tragic outcome, and what it means for patients and families who may be facing a similar situation. After several days of doctors failing to properly investigate his symptoms, a patient lost his life to a treatable infection.
Most people think of anesthesia as the part of surgery where you “go to sleep.” And for most patients, that’s more or less how it feels. But anesthesiologists are doing something far more complex and far more dangerous than simply administering medication. They are temporarily eliminating your body’s ability to protect its own airway and taking full responsibility for keeping you alive in its absence. When that responsibility is met with carelessness, inadequate preparation, or poor decision-making, the results can be catastrophic, even deadly.
Delayed diagnosis of colorectal cancer is not always an unavoidable tragedy. In many cases it is the direct result of a physician’s failure to screen appropriately, to recognize the warning signs, to follow up an abnormal test result, or to refer a patient for specialist evaluation. At Lupetin & Unatin, we investigate these cases, and we know how to determine whether your right to reasonable medical care was violated.
Pittsburgh trial attorney Gregory R. Unatin, a partner at Lupetin & Unatin, LLC, has once again been named to the Super Lawyers list of Top 50 Lawyers in Pittsburgh and the Top 100 Lawyers in Pennsylvania — honors he has now received consecutively since 2023. Separately, he has been recognized in Best Lawyers in America® 2026 for Personal Injury Litigation (Plaintiffs), one of the oldest and most credible peer-review distinctions in American law.
Brendan B. Lupetin, managing partner of Lupetin & Unatin, LLC in Pittsburgh, has been named the 2026 “Lawyer of the Year” for Personal Injury Litigation – Plaintiffs in Pittsburgh by Best Lawyers in America®. This distinction is awarded to only one attorney per practice area, per metropolitan area, per year—making it the most selective peer-reviewed honor in the legal profession.
If your child was born prematurely — before 32 weeks of gestation — and has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, one of the first questions an experienced birth injury attorney should ask is: Was magnesium sulfate administered before delivery? This is not a complicated question. It is not a matter of experimental medicine or cutting-edge science.
A Pittsburgh family’s worst nightmare began with a simple fever check at an urgent care clinic. Within hours, their vibrant 14-month-old daughter was gone—not from her illness, but from a medical system that failed to recognize a screaming emergency. This is the story of how Lupetin & Unatin held a Pennsylvania healthcare system accountable for missing what every medical professional should have seen: a heart rate so dangerously high it should have triggered an immediate code.
Cervical cancer is one of the most preventable cancers in medicine. The tools to detect it early – Pap smears and HPV testing – have existed for decades. The human papillomavirus (HPV) that causes more than 90% of all cervical cancers is identifiable in patients long before cancer develops, giving physicians a critical window to intervene.
Radiology is the branch of medicine most dependent on disciplined, systematic observation. A radiologist reviewing a chest CT does not just look for what the ordering physician suspects. The standard of care requires a thorough, methodical review of everything visible in the image — because the most important finding is often not the one anyone expected.
An echocardiogram is one of the most important diagnostic tools in cardiovascular medicine. Using ultrasound to create real-time images of the beating heart, it can detect heart valve disease, heart failure, blood clots, congenital abnormalities, and conditions that — if identified and treated promptly — are survivable. If missed, they can be fatal.
An incidental finding is an unexpected abnormality discovered during a medical imaging study that was ordered for a different reason. The term “incidentaloma” is commonly used when the finding is a mass or lesion — a nodule on the lung found during a chest X-ray for a broken rib, a lesion on the liver spotted during an abdominal CT for appendicitis, a thyroid nodule noticed on an ultrasound of the neck.
There is a persistent myth in medicine — one that doctors and hospitals sometimes invoke in their defense — that medicine is an art, not a science. The suggestion is that outcomes are unpredictable, that mistakes are inevitable, and that holding physicians accountable for errors is somehow unfair given the complexity of what they do.
