Medical Illustrations

Stephen Mader:
It’s a cliche that a picture’s worth a thousand words, but that is entirely what it is that I’m doing. My team and I are taking complex subject matters associated with medicine, and by creating visuals, we can explain those concepts in a clear and straightforward manner.

David Craig – Host:
I’m Attorney David Craig, managing partner and one of the founders of the law firm of Craig, Kelley & Faultless. I’ve represented people who have been seriously injured, who have had a family member killed in a semi or other big truck wreck, for over 30 years. Following the wrecks, their lives are chaos. Often, they don’t even know enough about the process to ask the right questions. It is my goal to empower you by providing you with the information you need to protect yourself and your family. In each and every episode, I will interview top experts and professionals that are involved in truck wreck cases. This is After the Crash.
Today, I’m honored to have as a guest Stephen Mader. I’ve known Stephen for years. I’ve had the pleasure and the privilege of working with Stephen. He is a certified medical illustrator, and that’s a big deal. There’s a lot of medical illustrators, but we’re going to talk a little bit more about why it’s a big deal to be a certified medical illustrator. He’s the president of Artery Studios. Artery Studios has been in the business of helping lawyers communicate about visuals and the medical side of a case, since 1992.
He’s got an office in Chicago. Stephen has his undergraduate degree in biology and medical illustrations. He has a master’s degree in biomedical communications from the Institute of Medical Science. He does some teaching and publishing. He has published a ton of articles in his area of expertise. He has drawn, has illustrated, and been part of that area. He’s been on the faculty to help teach other people how to do this. Stephen, welcome to After the Crash.

Stephen Mader:
Thank you very much, David. Really, it’s a pleasure to be here.

David Craig – Host:
Now, Stephen, let’s start off in the very beginning. What made you decide to go and become a medical illustrator?

Stephen Mader:
That’s a great question. I think of this often because I was one of those kids who be looked for frogs and snakes and catching fish. I would be look for the dead animals and dissect them. I would catch a fish, and I would look inside. I don’t know how common that was. I didn’t have any friends who did that, but I loved finding out and discovering what was inside. I even started drawing some of those things and just making little sketches of what it is that I was seeing.
I knew that I loved science, but I also loved making art. That’s two areas that often don’t meet. They are often divergent. A mentor who was a very important woman in my life, who is like a second mother to me, suggested this field of medical illustration when I was in university because I was popping back and forth between science and art. This is a perfect combination for me and for the other people who are in medical illustration if you do have this propensity for both loving science and medical concepts and also loving art and creativity. This is a perfect blend of left brain and right brain kind of thinking. I formed a company based on that to do the various kinds of work that I’ve done through my career.

David Craig – Host:
I think the key to success is doing what you love, and clearly, you love what you’re doing. I’ve seen you speak. I’ve seen you present things at trial or conferences. I’ve talked to you many times outside the booth, and you’re somebody who’s passionate about what you do.

Stephen Mader:
I am passionate because I feel really strongly that there can be incredibly complex information that people need to know, and the idea that visuals, in the form of either an illustration, a piece of artwork that is an illustration, an animation, or a movie demonstrate these kinds of medical concepts or scientific concepts speak. It’s a cliche that a picture’s worth a thousand words, but that is entirely what it is that I’m doing. My team and I are taking complex subject matters associated with medicine, and by creating visuals, we are helping to explain what it is that complex organisms that we are as humans and the kinds of things that medical advances do for us. Surgeries, all kinds of medical devices that are done, all kinds of treatments that we have the luxury of having access to: we can explain those concepts in a clear and straightforward manner.
Because I believe that we’re all visually oriented, that we evolved with sight. Those of us who are blessed with sight have been able to use sight to appreciate the world and to learn from the world and to recognize risk and to be attracted to things or not attracted to things. That strong visual slant is what I apply to the work that we do.

David Craig – Host:
I know that you got started early in your career in doing these very precise, very detailed illustrations. I know Grant’s Atlas of Anatomy is a book that I’m well familiar with. It’s like a bible of art medical illustrations. I’m sure I have a copy. I know I used to have a copy in my office, whether one of my lawyers have taken it or not. I was fascinated to find out that you, early on in your career, worked on this book as well in the ninth edition. Is that correct?

Stephen Mader:
That is correct. I was really pleased to work on this book. I think it was a significant opportunity for me to work on a book that had existed for decades, but to make it full color and more contemporary in its appeal to medical students and to other medical learners. I worked with a team, and we colorized it, but also created new illustrations that were explaining different concepts. I’m really happy to have worked on this. I have over 300 illustrations in this book, and not only did it teach me a great deal more about anatomy than what I had learned in medical school, but I also was able to understand that you couldn’t take anything for granted. That the complexity of anatomy, everything in an illustration, must be accurate when you’re creating medical illustrations. This was one of those really great opportunities to learn that. Working with Dr. Anne Agur and Dr. Lee to create images that were accurate and educational, it reinforced my understanding of anatomy.

David Craig – Host:
I know that book is widely used still to this day.

Stephen Mader:
It is. It’s used internationally. It’s translated in many different languages and used around the world. Many medical students use it to learn from.

David Craig – Host:
Now, I said in the very beginning, in the introduction, that you were a certified medical illustrator. This podcast is geared towards the average, everyday person who finds himself needing a personal injury lawyer for a catastrophic case, typically a truck case. So, they’re trying to figure out. The lawyer’s talking to them. A lot of times we take things for granted just like doctors take things for granted.
When I pick somebody to do a medical illustration for me, for one of my clients, it’s important to pick the right person, the right company, because if you pick the wrong person, the wrong company, it can have a horrible, negative effect. Picking the right one can be instrumental in communicating a complicated medical story to a jury, the insurance company, or to the defense lawyer.
So, let’s start off with – first of all – not all medical illustrators are created equal. What is involved in being a certified medical illustrator?

Stephen Mader:
Well, you’re right, David. Not all medical illustrators are created equal, and some people who have more of a Hollywood kind of a training can go into this thinking that it is lucrative or it’s an interesting area to work in, not fully understanding the kind of anatomical understanding, for example, of what I’ve just been discussing. To become a medical illustrator, there are only five schools in all of North America that are accredited. What that means is that their standards are such that they are in a medical school. They’re affiliated with a medical school. The science courses that are taught in medical school are what the medical illustration student learns, so anatomy, physiology, embryology, neuroanatomy, pathology, all of the different sciences, including dissection of the human body, which is an incredible privilege to have the opportunity to learn in that way, and taking the same exams as the medical students.
Then, rather than going to clinics and seeing patients, we take that information, and we apply it to learning how to clearly and effectively visually communicate that information. That’s a matter of training the left and the right brain to speak to each other and not let creativity overrule accuracy, and not let accuracy overrule creative problem-solving. That’s how we can do the work that we do as certified medical illustrators, and one becomes certified through the Association of Medical Illustrators.
It’s that kind of approach that allows me and my company to work with you, David, so that you can, in fact, be assured that the work that we’re doing is not just for a frivolous kind of communication. It’s for intent. It’s for you to successfully and convincingly put towards the jury and the judge the medical facts of the case, and put them forward in a visual format, so that everybody is on the same page and understands what the case entails. That’s really where we are adding significant value as certified medical illustrators or medical illustrators from an accredited school.

David Craig – Host:
I think that it’s important for people to understand that we can’t just take a medical drawing or illustration or computer-generated document and automatically get it introduced into evidence. There are rules that prohibit and require us to do certain things, and they have to meet a certain standard. So, you can have somebody draw something for you, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to get into evidence. In addition to that, it has to be very accurate. It has to be something that meets that standard. It has to be something that the medical professional that you’re working with, either she or he will take that and say, “Yeah. No, that is accurate. That’s the procedure. That’s exactly right. You’ve got it, you nailed it.”
I think when people are thinking about, “Well, guys, let’s pull something off the internet, and let’s plop it on and introduce it as evidence,” that doesn’t work in a trial. It doesn’t work in a courtroom, typically. You need something that not only is persuasive, informative, but it has to be accurate. When I first started my career, I used somebody that wasn’t very accurate. I didn’t know the difference when I first started. A doctor quickly explained to me how inaccurate my drawing was, and that would destroy your credibility if you presented that to the defense, to the insurance company, or even worse, if it ever got to a jury.
So, I think for people out there listening, it’s important to understand that your medical illustrations have to meet a certain standard. They have to be accurate. The people that are doing them have to know what they’re doing.

Stephen Mader:
I’m in complete agreement, and I would add or expand upon what you just said, David, and say that they need to be relevant. They need to demonstrate, to be relevant, and not just secondary to the case, they’re not showing superfluous information. They’re showing critical information that you are presenting in front of the judge and jury that is explaining key concepts associated with the file. What we do as medical legal illustrators, providing visuals for you to successfully present your client’s critical trauma, surgery complications, and even future predictions, issues. To demonstrate those things in a clear and convincing visual format, we need to distill this voluminous, this large number of medical files, reports and imaging, radiological imaging like x-rays, CT scans and MRIs. We narrow down. We focus in on those key radiological images, operative reports, or opinions of your experts. We work with your experts to be able to create images that will really assist your client at trial and assist you.
I’m stating the obvious to someone with your kind of experience, but it’s good for the listeners to think in terms of what we do in that regard.

David Craig – Host:
Yeah, I consider myself, as a trial lawyer, a storyteller, and I love telling stories. My grandkids – I’ve got three of them, and they’re four years old – we sit around the table, and we tell stories. My kids, when they were little, we sat around the table, and we would tell different stories every night at dinner, and the kids, everybody would take turns. Now, one of my kids tells stories through videos. He’s a professional videographer, and two of my kids are trial lawyers, and they tell stories through trials. Maybe I’ll have three grandkids that will follow in our footsteps, and do one or the other, but we’re storytellers.
To be an effective storyteller, first of all, I think you have to have credibility. That’s critical. But then on top of that, you have to not waste people’s time. You’ve got to tell them the story. Like what your point is, you’ve got to tell them the part that’s important, and then we all know that you have to show them because you can sit and talk and talk and talk, and you’ll lose them, but if you can show them in such a way, and what we’re trying to do is communicate the story to ultimately, our jurors. That story, we have to communicate to them effectively.
So, we have to hire people like you who are professionals at what they do to help us tell our story. That story typically involves, in a personal injury world, medical issues. That’s one of the things I love about working with you is that you work on not only the accuracy – which is extraordinarily important – but you also help us tell the story. I can understand how your interest in biology created an interest in doing what you do, but what do you think helps you and your company stand out as assisting in the storytelling aspect, because that’s a different quality?

Stephen Mader:
You’re right. That is what makes us stand out. We look at the case through your eyes. We look at how you would present the story – not that we can get inside your head, but we know enough of having had a conversation on what the file entails, what your client’s significant concerns, problems, complications are, and what led to that with the complexity of their injury. Perhaps if it’s a product liability issue or a workplace issue, we look at it through the lens of how are you telling the story, and how can we make visuals that are fully going to dovetail with what it is that you are thinking, and what you’re experts are testifying to on the stand.
I’d love to pick up on this idea, because there is one that stands out for me that I’ll just display. This is a story of someone who is at a party, and this pool is such that the side is soft and collapses. This fellow jumps into the pool, but somersaults over it. As a result of how the design of the pool is made, he suffers this significant spinal cord injury, where, by flipping over the side, he fractures his spine. This hyperextension or significant bending of the neck down towards the chest causes what’s called facet dislocation and other disruption of the spinal column, causing his spinal cord injury.
These are complex words, but the visual is clear as to what it is that has gone wrong with this fellow. By him approaching the pool and because of its soft-sided, rebound nature, it causes him to flip and to have what is a very, well – certainly life-changing occurrence for him, rendering him quadriplegic. We are telling this as a visual story, just like you communicate via words this story. I think that all the viewers can appreciate that when we tell a story visually like this, we have such an enhanced level of understanding of what has happened to this very unfortunate client.

David Craig – Host:
I think that’s a perfect example. I think, again, the goal is to communicate and to communicate effectively and accurately. That’s a perfect example of an animation that your company has put together for someone. Typically, we find we will work with either a medical illustration, an animation, a 3D model, and, I guess, interactive media are some of the ways that you help us tell our story.
Maybe you can talk a little about the different ones and different methods you helped. That was a perfect example of an animation that helps us visually show somebody. From talking to jurors and focus group folks, I have found that those are things people don’t forget. When they visually see something, it sticks with them. Whereas, if I were just to describe that in just nothing but words, and have a doctor sitting on the stand talking about it or an expert, or a pool expert, it would not have the same impact.

Stephen Mader:
You’ve hit upon a really important issue here. That is, that we’re mindful that the visual is retained by people. There is a concept called the pictorial superiority effect. What that means is that the picture is remembered. It’s retained by our brain. When people are told a story, they remember a limited percentage of that. When they’re shown a story, they remember significantly more. When they are told and then shown a visual, then the level of remembering of that concept skyrockets to the point of being over 75% retention of that information after a few days.
When you are in trial and we are assisting you with our visuals, and you are presenting, through your experts, a large volume of information. You want the key information, of course, to be retained by your jurors. That’s how we’re helping. We’re helping your clients’ issues be remembered so that they get a fair assessment by the jury on the critical issues that you have presented using our visuals to demonstrate those key findings, those key issues that you don’t want anyone to forget.
We do that in different ways. We do that in the animation, like I’ve demonstrated to you, but we also do that in the form of other visual formats. Those are all collectively called – just for your viewers to know this word – demonstrative evidence. That demonstrative evidence is what we are creating in the form of the animation that you’ve seen, which are medical illustrations that are pure illustrations that are on boards or projected on screens, but we also do things like timelines. If your client has had a lot of kinds of history of many different issues going on, we put that into a format that everybody can see the passage of time and what’s associated with that development of time. We put that in that format and other kinds of interactive media like PowerPoint presentations, demonstrating surgeries in a different slide formats. But also you refer to the 3D printing. We can take CT scans that very, very few people can understand, except for specialists, and we put those into a 3D format, a print that people can readily appreciate what it is that this significant trauma was.
I can show you some examples of illustrations and maybe just talk about a few of the things that we’ve created. This is a fairly common thing for us to demonstrate. David, I know you do a lot of trucking litigation. You’re a specialist in the trucking litigation world, and this could just as easily be a truck rather than a sedan on the left side of the screen. This is demonstrating how someone’s significant knee injury occurred as a result of them almost jackknifing over top of the vehicle, and the resulting knee injuries that we see on the right, from this bending of the knee in a way that the knee is not supposed to bend.
We demonstrate this kind of mechanism of injury to show how your client was injured and other details like this, including a wrist injury that was associated with it against the handlebar, but also surgeries. Surgeries can be very complex. They can take hours. A surgery can be highly detailed. In this instance, we’ve got a facial fracture, skull fractures here that have had many plates applied to the bones with tiny little screws that hold all of these plates onto the fractured pieces. This is how we’re able to clearly demonstrate that this person is left with a large amount of hardware of plates in their face as a result of the injury that they had.
We can even show this in more detail in consultation with the surgeon who’s going to be testifying or another medical expert who wants to describe this surgery in great detail. We can show all of the steps that the surgeon went through to be able to put this person’s face sort of back together again. They won’t be perfect. We can demonstrate all of these details of what that surgery entailed and other kinds of treatments that, in this instance, caused nerve damage and show how this relates, and, David, for your storytelling and for your expert’s storytelling, to show exactly where in the mouth this is being injected and what’s happening with this client, with going to the dentist and having an injury as a result of an injection not being performed properly. Those are the kinds of things that we are able to show in illustration format.

David Craig – Host:
So, how this works is that we represent somebody, or a personal injury lawyer represents somebody, and they then collect medical records. They collect diagnostic test results, scans, x-rays, or whatever, Then, they give that to you all, and you guys take a look at it. You help the lawyer put together this visual. You help us decide what type of visuals to use, and then you put it together. We take that into the doctors and make sure that they are accurate. The doctors will make changes, sometimes and say, “Well, let’s tweak this or tweak that.” Then, we go back to you, and you work on it. Sometimes you work hand in hand with the doctors to make sure that it’s accurate.
We talked about that a little bit earlier, but then the next step is, okay, and – what my standpoint always is when I’m looking at these, when I’m looking at a photograph of somebody, an x-ray, CT scan, or a medical illustration – how does it help me tell the story? Does it really emphasize the things that I want to be emphasized? If you have a significant injury, and that is the main part of an injury, or the main thing that client’s having problems with, sometimes I tell my clients, “Well, maybe we don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about these other injuries.” Not because they weren’t painful, not because they didn’t exist, but because they take away from our story.
I think that’s something, as trial lawyers get experience, we gain some insight as to what’s important, what’s not important. Also, working with somebody like yourself, I’m sure you see that as well is – what are we going to do? How are we going to tell this story? What tools are we going to use? What things should we include and which things we shouldn’t include?

Stephen Mader:
Again, I love this conversation, because you are raising this decision-making for what, from a medical standpoint, would be the long-term, long-lasting kinds of effects. We know from a conversation that we’ll have with you that an injury to a joint, a fracture to a knee, a brain injury that has CT scan findings that are demonstrating some issues, some bleeding inside the brain, we know that those are the kinds of things that are going to mean more to your client because they might have more long-term complications from those injury issues. Sure, there may be a broken finger or there may be other areas of injury on the body, but I know from my medical training – my team does as well – that those issues are probably not focused on too much by your medical experts.
We can see that in their depositions. We can see that in their opinions that they’re stating, but we’re also primed to that. We’re aware of that because of our experience. Then, the conversation that you and I have is different because we are creating visuals that are not going to show absolutely everything. Perhaps we’d have an overview that would demonstrate the different various components, parts of the body that are injured, but you’re not necessarily going to focus on that, like you’ve just articulated. So, we’re then going to focus on what we really want the jury to remember as to not overwhelm them with many different parts of the body. We also focus on the things that are, as you say, potentially really going to cause your client some long-term potential problems that they’ll need medical treatment for. They’ll need resources, the financial resources, to have some injections, surgeries, physiotherapy or other kinds of medical interventions that’s going to help them feel a bit better – or not deteriorate as quickly.

David Craig – Host:
I agree with you. One thing you said is that maybe we’ll have a board with everything. What I look at is I start off with, like you just showed on one of your visuals, was the mechanism of injury. How did somebody get hurt? Let’s show the mechanism of injury, and in that case you showed us was somebody hitting the front head on a motorcycle or scooter, versus a car. We show the mechanism of injury. Sometimes we’ve worked together where we show a brain injury. We show the shaking of a head and the movement of the brain inside the skull, the impact from an airbag, and a seat. That shows us that’s the mechanism of injury. That’s how this client got hurt.
Then we show the injuries. I like to have a board that has all the injuries on it. It doesn’t mean I have to emphasize it, but it just shows it, and it’s real quick, brief, but visually, I see, “Oh, my goodness, there’s all these injuries on somebody.” If there’s surgeries, we want to show what the surgeries are, so you show boards, animations, or videos on how a surgery takes place. Then we want to talk about – like you said – a timeline, often showing how many therapy sessions, doctor’s appointments, or injections. To try to show that, if you just tell somebody, that it’s not as impactful as if you show them that.
Then, we show that timeline. I can’t remember a case that I’ve done in recent history where I haven’t shown them a timeline. In fact, one of the things I’ve done recently is if it’s a small county, I have somebody take pictures. I have somebody take pictures of the doctor’s office because it may be somebody’s office that they’re all familiar with that’s right there in town. I’ll slap that on the board because it’s, “Gosh, I know where that’s at.” Again, it has more impact because they see it. They see, “Oh, yeah. Okay, that’s Dr. Smith.”
Then, we do the future. Sometimes our clients are facing future surgeries, future procedures, and so we want to show that as well. All those type of things, whether it’s the 3D model, which I think is pretty cool that you have. I haven’t had the right case yet, but if it had a fractured foot or a hand, an ankle where if people could actually hold it in their hands and look at it. How could you not remember that? I think all of these different ways, and I know probably in a lot of cases you work on, you use multiple different types of visuals.

Stephen Mader:
We do because it can become repetitious to use only the same kind of image, and successful attorneys like yourself, comment to us that you want to vary it so that you keep the jury engaged. You show them different kinds of visuals. You might do a still illustration, a flat illustration on a board, or projection to show one concept, but then another might be a movie or another might be an interactive presentation. Another might be a 3D model that’s passed around. By presenting different formats of visual, demonstrative evidence, the jury can remain excited, interested, and engaged with what it is that all of this long, perhaps lengthy, trial might entail.

David Craig – Host:
I know you work with lawyers all over North America. You work with lawyers all over the United States, all over the country, and I know there’s probably different strategies involved in when they might include or involve you, or a medical illustrator. When does a medical illustrator get involved in a case?

Stephen Mader:
That’s a great question. It does vary, depending upon the style of the attorney that we’re working with, or the lawyer that we’re working with. Usually, we are involved early. We are involved at the stage of the deposition; for your viewers to understand who are not in the litigation arena area, that’s when the doctors often are giving their opinions on the medical issues. We are oftentimes creating images and visuals that assist them when they’re providing their deposition. David, I’m sure you could give a whole lot of detail to your listeners on how that works. We’re creating visuals for that stage often.
Then again, for your listeners to know that the case may, in fact, mediate. There may be a mediation, and we provide visuals so that everyone is on the same page and everyone understands at a mediation where a decision is. You’re trying to reach a compromise decision for agreement for settling the file. Then if the file doesn’t settle, we are creating the visuals that we have created, or we add to the visuals that we have created, and get that ready to go to trial.
We’re creating our images from the early stages, potentially, even for the demand letter, for us to have the full understanding of all of the litigation participants in what those issues are. Because it’s a visual format that we’re presenting this in, there is an economy of time that’s involved. We save vast amounts of time of reading, presenting, and orally describing all this information. Again, it’s a cliche. A picture’s worth a thousand words, and it does encapsulate all this information into clear images that saves everyone time.

David Craig – Host:
I’m a big advocate of using medical illustrators early. I know that I’ve been told by lawyers. I actually have defense lawyers who come up and say, “Hey, I listen to your podcast. I watch your podcast.” I have plaintiff lawyers. I have all kinds of lawyers from all over the country who have reached out to me, in addition to just the people who I’m actually doing this for, which is just the average everyday person. I would encourage you, if you’re a client, to ask your lawyer, “Are we using a medical illustrator? Who are we using?” Now, they’re going to a little bit more. They’re going to know a little bit more what questions to ask. Are they certified?
Then, encourage them to use them early. I believe that they add value, and that’s the question is: are they adding value to the case? The reality is they do add value. They add significant value, not only to the jury. What most people don’t understand, is that a very small percentage of our cases actually get to go to trial. I don’t make my clients go to trial, and I don’t make my clients settle. I’m happy to go to trial. I do go to trial. My firm goes to trial regularly, but that’s a choice that’s my clients’. But I will tell you that if you prepare to go to trial, it increases the value of your case, even if you settle it.
If you can communicate your story to the defense lawyer and to the insurance adjuster, that increases the value. So, why in the world hold it and wait until a jury? Why not try to increase the value and tell your story effectively with the decision-makers who have the pocket, who have the money to compensate your clients? I use them in mediations. I use them in my doctor’s depos. In mediations – if you’re a plaintiff lawyer out there listening – believe me: your clients appreciate seeing the art and the work that has been done because they don’t even understand what’s happened to them. They don’t understand the procedures, and these boards, my clients are fascinated. I’ve never done a mediation with medical illustrations where my clients haven’t been dumbfounded, and they love them. Ultimately, at the end of the case, they take them. The reality is that they are so helpful and using them early is better than using them late, in my opinion.

Stephen Mader:
I love that description that you provided, David because we refer to it as this eureka moment that people receive. You can be very close to the file, and you can know all the language. You can know all the injuries that have occurred, but we then do provide our images and just like you’ve described, everyone will say, “Oh, wow! I had no idea that the bone pieces were separated that far apart. I didn’t know there were that many of those bone pieces. I read the description, but I didn’t know it looked exactly like that. I read about the surgery, but I didn’t know that much hardware was placed in there. I can see it sort of on the films, but I didn’t understand that there’s that much that was entailed in doing this surgery.” This wonderful eureka moment of people really being fully aware of what the issues are is the persuasive power of the visual.

David Craig – Host:
Absolutely. I’ve been doing this for 35 years, and I’ve just seen the difference. Most people, they’re afraid to talk to their lawyers in detail and ask a lot of questions – they’re afraid to talk to their doctors even more. They don’t typically review their medical records. They’ve been told by a doctor, “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to go through the front of your neck, and we’re going to put a bone in there and whatever.” But they don’t get it. They don’t understand. It’s very superficial. They’re more worried about what’s going to happen to them than the actual procedure. Then, when they come in and see it, and if they have the family with them, they say, “Oh, my God, see what I went through? See what they did?” It’s such a powerful, powerful, powerful presentation.

Stephen Mader:
Yeah, and no wonder my recovery was two or three months long. Now I understand what it is that the surgeon did to try to correct the injury that I had. Knowledge is power. They then know what it is that has happened to them. It’s not just this question as to, the surgeon did something to put me back together again. Now, I know what the surgeon really did to try to help me.

David Craig – Host:
I would encourage that. I’ll even go a step further that these are so powerful that your lawyer, hopefully, is looking at it saying, “How do we increase the value?” How we increase value to make sure someone’s getting fully compensated for what harm has been done to them. How do we right the wrong that’s been caused to our clients? The best way to do that is make sure that we’re communicating the story effectively.
We don’t know. We have an idea how to communicate that story. We try a lot of cases. We work with people like yourself, but I would even encourage people to use these in focus groups before, in the very beginning, early on. I’m very fortunate to work with you with a trial consultant and a neuropsychologist. That’s one of the things that we work on is, “Okay, let’s practice on how to tell this story. How do we communicate a story to somebody?” Ultimately, if you’re listening, that’s in your best interest because you want to have the story told in such a way that people understand what happened to you. I would encourage lawyers listening to this to even go back and start practicing, focus grouping, trying different things, so that they can increase the value and the effectiveness of their story.

Stephen Mader:
David, you just referred to the brain injury idea, and I would like to demonstrate that, in fact, we show invisible injuries, too. I know you and I have worked extensively on this idea, and I’d like to just show a very small part of what it is that we are doing together to be able to show what happens in this instance with concussive brain injury. The reason that it’s considered to be invisible is that CT scans and MRI scans don’t necessarily show the microscopic, cellular injury details. They’re not fine enough to pick up on little breaks in the cells like are happening here with brain cells that are called neurons, and their little extensions, called axons, being broken here and causing this kind of damage in the brain.
That’s not evident on scanning, and your clients might not have had this incredibly complex treatment in hospital; nevertheless, they’ve suffered this kind of invisible injury that we’re animating together to allow you to really help your clients who have suffered this kind of brain trauma, and get fair compensation for something that is a very serious issue.

David Craig – Host:
Absolutely. I know that when you first started – I think, my guess is if you’re like me – the way we show things is completely different today than it was 35 years ago. Tell me, how do you stay up on that? What does the future hold? How are we going to continue to grow and expand. What do you see being effective tools in the future?

Stephen Mader:
I love this question because this is where my company, Artery Studios, works in the area of cutting-edge medicine. We create visuals that also demonstrate medical devices and medical treatments that are being developed. These are innovative approaches to treating the body, and these can be just purely in their infancy. We’re talking about things that get implanted inside the body, things like heart valves, artificial joints, knee replacement, or hip replacements. Those are constantly evolving and becoming better and better, and there is technology associated with how those are working. I’ve just listed a couple of examples there, but there is just a huge number of different medical devices that are being created and drugs that are being created. We demonstrate those cutting-edge technologies in the other side of our company at Artery Studios.
That keeps us fresh and keeps us thinking in terms of what the future holds. We can see what’s happening in the medical legal cases like in the demonstrative evidence work that we’re creating for someone like yourself. We actually are seeing the cutting-edge medicine being deployed into the patients who are being treated, and that keeps us fresh. The depth of the medical knowledge, the new medical advances are what we very much keep on top of.
There are the other areas of 3D printing that we couldn’t do several years ago that we can do now. We were a leader in using 3D printing to be able to show what a CT scan looks like if you printed it in 3D. The kinds of technology of animation, that animation used to take weeks or months to be able to create, videos and movies that now take a matter of – well, it still takes some weeks – but certainly not the length of time that they took before.
So, we are keeping abreast of not only the medicine but also how to show that. Even looking at how AI may influence the decisions that we make as a creative team, for how we’re presenting our information, and can AI assist us in any kind of way to make our images even better than they are right now? Yeah, it’s exciting. The future is exciting in medicine. I believe that the work that we are doing will only continue to grow in its offerings for you to be able to use for your clients, and to make the kind of communication tools that we’re creating even clearer and better as the future goes on.

David Craig – Host:
I think that’s going to be critical. The attention span of folks is getting shorter, and so you have to hit them. You have to give them something that’s worth watching, worth seeing, and worth hearing. We all have to do that. We all have to stay on top of this, and I think it is exciting because it makes us better storytellers.
Stephen, is there anything else you want to talk about or that we haven’t covered? I know we’ve covered a lot of different areas.

Stephen Mader:
Well, yeah, I just think this idea that you are helping people to regain some kind of better recovery with the financial outcomes that you achieve for people. It’s a pleasure to work with lawyers like yourself, to be able to help your clients to clearly and effectively communicate their medical files so that people are on the same page, and that fair compensation is, in fact, awarded to people who have had a really unfortunate circumstance of not their fault. Something has happened to them. It’s a pleasure to work in this area, to be able to visualize for the assistance of other people, and giving them a bit of a better quality of life from their injury state.

David Craig – Host:
I agree. Stephen, like I said, sometimes lawyers watch this. How do lawyers reach out to you and find you?

Stephen Mader:
Well, we can post a connector, a link on screen, and my company is Artery Studios. You can Google us. It’s arterystudios.com, and we can post my email link here as well and contact information. We would be pleased to discuss with you either if you are a lawyer wondering how it is that you might present the case, a medical expert who is going to be testifying, or perhaps, even someone who has been injured and they’re wondering whether their lawyer would want to use medical illustrations for their case.

David Craig – Host:
Stephen, I appreciate it. Again, for those folks listening that are not lawyers, that just had the misfortune of being injured, I would strongly recommend that you talk to your attorneys about using medical illustrators. Just so you know, because people don’t know this, this is not something you pay out of your pocket yourself right up front. Your lawyers will pay that cost. They’ll pay the medical illustrators, and then they get reimbursed at the end of the case. So, there’s no reason at all not to utilize a good medical illustrator in helping you tell your story, so that you can be adequately and fairly compensated.
All right, Stephen, thank you so much for being the guest. I appreciate it.

Stephen Mader:
Thank you, David. I appreciate it. It’s a pleasure speaking with you.

David Craig – Host:
This is David Craig, and you’ve been listening to After the Crash. If you’d like more information about me or my law firm, please go to our website ckflaw.com. If you’d like to talk to me, you can call 1-800-ASK-DAVID. If you would like a guide on what to do after a truck wreck, then pick up my book, Semitruck Wreck: A Guide for Victims and Their Families, which is available on Amazon, or you can download it for free on our website, ckflaw.com.