Court: Doctor not responsible for man's injuries caused when his patient suffered a seizure while driving and crashed

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that doctors' first responsibility is to their patients, not to the public at large.

The decision comes in suit by a man who wanted damages from a Mass. General neurologist whose patient suffered a seizure and crashed into him.

Richard Medina required multiple operations to repair the arm damage done in the 2001 crash and said Dr. Fred Hochberg should have done more to keep his patient, Robert Riskind, who had inoperable brain cancer, off the road:

In the present case, Medina argues that we should recognize a parallel duty owed by physicians to members of the public who might be injured by a patient as a consequence of the underlying medical condition that the physician is treating. Medina contends that such a duty arises out of either a purported special relationship between a physician and a patient or ordinary negligence principles.

The court, however, rejected the argument, saying that Riskind's seizure was due to the tumor - which killed him six months after the crash - and not to anything Hochberg did.

Taken to its logical end, Medina's proposed duty would require warning patients about the dangers associated with driving based on any number of preexisting health conditions, none of which stems from the physician's affirmative treatment of the patient. Thus, we agree with the motion judge's conclusion that the "simple act of accepting Riskind as a patient, with his preexisting medical condition, cannot be the basis for imposing a duty on Dr. Hochberg to an unlimited number of people with whom he has no relationship, with attendant liability for harm caused by the effects of the medical condition ... not caused by any act of Dr. Hochberg."

The court continued that by requiring doctors to consider possible affects on the public in their medical decisions, the result could be to harm what should be the doctor's primary responsibility: His or her patient:

In addition to this important legal distinction, a policy-based, cost-benefit analysis, weighing the benefits of such a duty against the countervailing costs of intruding into the highly personal, confidential physician-patient relationship, also counsels against imposing such an expansive duty. On the one hand, as Medina asserts, the putative benefit of imposing such a duty would be an increase in public safety. On the other hand, such a duty would threaten the autonomous nature of the physician-patient relationship by causing a physician to "become less concerned about the particular requirements of any given patient, and more concerned with protecting himself or herself from lawsuits by the potentially vast number of persons who will interact with and may fall victim to that patient's conduct outside of the treatment setting." ... Finally, the duty would also "threaten the confidentiality inherent in the doctor-patient relationship" by potentially requiring a physician to reveal private medical records concerning a patient's underlying medical condition in order to comply with inevitable discovery requests.

• Complete ruling, Richard Medina vs. Fred H. Hochberg