This motion relies on federal rules of evidence and Daubert to argue that a physician should not be permitted to testify that a person died from an oxycodone overdose when there are alternative potential causes of death – such as cardiac arrhythmia – that have not be properly eliminated. More generally, the motion explains when doctors who rely on differential diagnosis – the process of identifying the cause of a medical problem by eliminating likely causes until the most probable one is isolated – are conducting a reliable, medical analysis versus when their analyses are compromised by cognitive biases. The social science collected in this motion would be useful to defenders challenging the validity of any causal conclusion physicians reach.
Pages 4-6 explain the differential diagnosis process and how it can lead physicians to make unreliable conclusions about cause of death. Pages 6-17 discuss how cognitive biases like confirmation bias, role effects, the availability heuristic, and the representativeness error can infect differential diagnoses. Pages 17-20 talk about when differential diagnoses are unreliable due to a physician’s failure to properly rule in certain causes and rule out potential alternatives. Pages 20-24 draw analogies to the forensic sciences and argue that the physician in this case could testify that there was oxycodone in the patient’s system but should not have been able to opine with certainty that it caused the patient’s death. Pages 24-28 explain why the doctor’s ultimate opinion invaded the province of and was unhelpful to the jury.