In right this moment’s case, Chapman v. AstraZeneca, a Delaware state court docket granted abstract judgment to the defendant pharmaceutical producer after excluding the plaintiff’s causation professional below Delaware Rule of Proof 702 as a result of the professional’s opinion was not “acknowledged by way of medical likelihood.”
The plaintiff claimed that the defendant’s proton pump inhibitor, a category of medication used to deal with acid reflux disease problems, induced her to endure continual liver illness. To prevail, the plaintiff needed to current “proof of each normal and particular causation.” Chapman v. AstraZeneca Pharms. LP, 2022 WL 4740721, at *1 (Del. Tremendous. Ct. 2022).
To determine particular causation, i.e., to show that the defendant’s drug not solely could cause continual liver illness in precept however induced her continual liver illness particularly, the plaintiff provided a medical professional. The professional opined that the plaintiff’s use of the defendant’s drug “may have contributed” and “could have contributed” to her continual kidney illness.” 2022 WL 4740721, at *4. Arguing that the professional’s opinion was “speculative,” the defendant moved to exclude it below Delaware Rule of Proof 702, which is worded equally to the identically numbered, soon-to-be-amended federal rule.
Below Delaware’s interpretation of the U.S. Supreme Court docket’s Daubert determination, an professional medical opinion just isn’t admissible until the court docket “decide[s]” that it’s “acknowledged by way of affordable medical likelihood or an inexpensive medical certainty.” 2022 WL 4740721, at *2 (quoting O’Riley v. Rogers, 69 A.3d 1007, 1011 (Del. 2013)).
The Chapman court docket discovered that the plaintiff’s professional opinion didn’t fulfill this normal.
The court docket made clear that “[e]xpert witnesses should not have to explicitly use the phrases ‘affordable medical certainty,’ however the total summation of the opinion should lend itself to that conclusion.” 2022 WL 4740721, at *4. Thus, though “Delaware legislation supplies for flexibility on the precise wording of professional testimony,” the professional’s “opinion should permit the Court docket to conclude that the professional finds: (i) one choice extra possible or doubtless than the others; (ii) that, having weighed various components or consulting materials from his subject, the professional has eradicated different attainable causes; or (iii) that the various components have led the professional to suspect that this one issue is extra doubtless the reason for the difficulty than one other.” Id.
In Chapman, the professional’s opinion—the plaintiff’s use of a proton pump inhibitor “may have contributed to her creating … continual kidney illness”—was “too speculative to be admissible” below that normal. 2022 WL 4740721, at *5 (emphasis added). Though the opinion “rule[d] out some attainable causes” of the plaintiff’s illness, it “equivocate[d] as to … different [possible] causes.” Id. Certainly, the professional “admit[ted] that he finds it “not possible to discern if one explicit agent was extra doubtless than one other to have induced” plaintiff’s illness. Id. In brief, the court docket held that the professional’s causation opinion was inadmissible as a result of it was “acknowledged by way of chance and never likelihood.”
Having excluded plaintiff’s professional, the court docket granted the defendant abstract judgment as a result of the plaintiff couldn’t carry her burden absent admissible proof of particular causation.
A pleasant little win to start out the week.
