Effective Use Of Medical Literature
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- Case Management
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- Software,
- Litigation,
- Literature,
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- Healthcare,
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Overview: All personal injury cases involve medicine and law. The law is applied to the facts to determine the person responsible for causing injury to the plaintiff. Principles of medicine determine the nature and extent of the injury, as well as the causal relationship to the negligent conduct. In every PI case, a health care provider testifies about the application of principles of medicine. All health care providers rely to some degree on medical literature such as journals or learned treatises to support their opinions. At different stages during litigation, medical literature is handled in a variety of ways. The majority rule is that learned treatises may not be used as independent evidence of facts or opinions. This paper will discuss the various ways medical literature may be used during different stages of litigation. During litigation medical literature may be used to educate, persuade or impeach. Effective use of medical literature depends upon identifying literature that is relevant, probative and authoritative. The search for persuasive literature begins with the expert. Counsel should condition the jury to accept medical literature evidence with the same degree of confidence with which it would accept the in-court testimony of the treatise's author's. This conditioning to believe medical literature begins with voir dire.
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Format: HTML | Date: Jan 2003 | Pages: 1
