TexasCHLforum.com

This is what happens when we allow people to speak in areas other than where their expertise is. The doctors MAY have some expertise in forensic medicine, though I doubt it (I did not read the bios of any of the authors of the article - or even check if they were there). Any doctor thinks he can speak on all things medical and they are almost as bad as lawyers on thinking they can speak on other areas as well. But medicine is a large and complicated field, where most doctors will admit they specialize in a specific area and are not qualified to talk about other areas. For example, if you ask a pulmonologist to speak about measles or other children's diseases, he would normally tell you to go find a pediatrician. Certain fields, and epidemiologists jump to mind, think that they are qualified to speak on anything that is a widely occurring event, even if it is not a medical event. This is how we hear that "gun violence" or "opioid addiction" are epidemics and public health issues.

But in this article, the doctors want to say that the lawyers are deliberately misinterpreting the medical information and they use legal information and language. The term "but for" is a legal term used to help fix causation for legal purposes and is not a medical term at all. In reality, it can not be used in medical cases because it presumes to much that is not true. Another example of the problem in their logic is insisting that coronary disease increases the odds of a heart attack over a long period of time, not over seconds. Thus, a heart attack can not be attributed to the coronary disease being a contributing factor. But every heart attack happens over a period of seconds. Does this mean that hardening of the arteries is NOT really a factor to take into account?

If they had just wanted to argue over how to interpret the results of the autopsies, I might give them some credence. I would listen more if they had experience in forensic medicine. But the way the article is honestly just virtue signaling at its worst and is truly embarrassing to Scientific American for publishing it.