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Ensuring accuracy in medical testimony: Calling "experts" to account

There are welcome signs that greater accountability is coming for physician expert witnesses.

Editorial. Sept. 16, 2002.

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"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?"

"I do."

The question, asked by a sworn officer of the court, and the answer, given by a witness whose right hand is resting on a Bible, is spoken hundreds of times a day in courtrooms across this country. This oath is one of the cornerstones of our justice system -- as sacred to the implementation of fairness in dispensing justice as the Hippocratic oath is to the practice of medicine.

Physicians who serve as medical experts must take extra care to fulfill their obligations to each oath when they take the witness stand. The justice system has its own way of holding witnesses accountable, through perjury laws. The medical profession is now expanding its own appropriate role in ensuring competent testimony. Increasingly, expert witnesses who deliver faulty testimony could face the possibility of discipline from their professional organizations or their state medical board.

The American Medical Association considers the giving of medicolegal testimony as a physician expert witness to be the practice of medicine and believes it should be subject to peer review.

And two recent cases in which physicians have been subject to discipline for testimony deemed improper illustrate that the professional consequences of giving such testimony can indeed be dire.

In July, the North Carolina Medical Board revoked the license of a Florida neurosurgeon for engaging in what the board called unprofessional conduct by misstating facts and the appropriate standard of care in that state. [...]