Medical malpractice; Craig ex rel Craig v. Oakwood Hosp.; Whether there was a breach of the standard of care (SOC); Personal representative (PR)

Holding that when reviewing the SOC actually articulated by plaintiff-PR’s expert, defendant clearly did not breach that SOC, the court affirmed. This medical malpractice case concerned defendant’s (a ear, nose, and throat doctor) treatments of plaintiff's decedent, Thomas. Plaintiff argued that defendant breached the SOC “by not telling Thomas that a CT scan was necessary to rule out possible serious conditions like cancer, and that there is evidence that, had defendant not breached this [SOC], Thomas would have gotten the CT scan.” Unfortunately for plaintiff, her SOC “expert never testified that defendant had a duty to inform Thomas that a CT scan was necessary to rule out cancer or other serious conditions.” Plaintiff argued that defendant owed Thomas a duty “to explain the reasons for ordering a particular diagnostic test, including the potentially life-threatening conditions that the test is intended to screen for,” and breached that duty by not telling him that “he needed a CT scan so that defendant could rule out cancer or other potentially serious conditions.” Plaintiff relied on an excerpt from Dr. M’s (plaintiff’s SOC expert) testimony to support her stated SOC. The court held that it was clear that M “did not testify that a doctor owes a patient a duty to inform the patient that a test is needed to rule out potentially serious conditions.” Instead, M testified that a doctor satisfies the SOC “if the doctor tells the patient that a test is needed ‘to assist in diagnosing’ a problem that the doctor has been otherwise unable to diagnose.” The court held that there was “no genuine issue of material fact that defendant satisfied” the SOC. “Thomas testified that defendant told him a CT scan was necessary because defendant ‘didn’t really see nothing’ in the other tests that could explain Thomas’s problems. Likewise, defendant testified that he discussed with Thomas that a CT scan was needed to diagnose the cause of Thomas’s problems.” When viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to plaintiff, there was “no evidence that defendant failed to tell Thomas that the CT scan was needed to assist defendant in diagnosing Thomas’s otherwise undiagnosed problem.” Thus, there was no genuine issue of material fact that defendant did not breach the SOC articulated by M.