The first time I read that my mind substituted the word position instead of possibility.

The defense claimed the deceased was “”instructed to avoid exertional activity until after the nuclear stress test was completed.”

source: http://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/news/2012/may/31/family-awarded-3-million-in-mans-sex-death/

To me, the big chunk that is missing is “who was in the room when the deceased was warned?”

If it was just the doctor and the patient, this seems like a terribly wrong verdict as it can’t stand up to facts. If the wife or someone else was in the room when the discussion took place and they say no warning was issued, that is different.

If the doctor is correct and the deceased was warned, the only thing this can lead to is doctors now having to record conversations with patients, having a third party in the room, or having the patient sign some form acknowledging every possibility known to mankind (as John Burgess notes says above.)

The doctor should have taken 1 minute to explain to the patient not to engage in any sort of strenuous activity, because his heart looked bad and they needed more testing to see how he was really doing.

I just did that in half of a sentence in plain-spoken English. No threesome, no free diving, no mountain climbing. Just a regular old warning, and then scheduling the stress test ASAP. Is that so hard?

I think I agree with you in principle. But there is NOT much to go in in that article. If the doc warned against ‘strenuous activity’ then, I think this award is a crime. You shouldn’t have to be given a list of everything you should avoid.

If the issue is that the doc didn’t recognize the problem and failed to warn, I don’t know what the problem was or what the standard of care for the situation is so I can’t say what I think the the verdict should have been but I can see the award being reasonable.

I mean, the doctor didn’t caution him about free diving or attempting K2 or Everest. Is envisioning the patient in a threesome necessarily less outrageous?

Next time I’m at my doctor’s office, I’ll be sure to ask for a detailed itemization of what I shouldn’t do. Then I’ll make sure the list is comprehensive. I hear Machu Pichu is pretty this time of year….

It looked like garden variety malpractice to me. It’s the standard of care to warn patients with symptoms like that to refrain from strenuous activity until they’ve completed a subsequent stress test, which means the only question here is: should his family be denied compensation on the grounds that he died while committing an immoral act? I submit that view would open us up to the worst kind of society, one in which we have one set of laws for the upstandin’ folks and one set of laws for the no-good folks.