Causation and Epidemiology
Medical Causation
Medical causation requires a physician or qualified expert to connect the incident or exposure to the diagnosed condition to a reasonable degree of medical probability. It addresses both whether the mechanism could cause the injury and whether it did.
Differential diagnosis is the standard method for identifying the most probable cause among alternatives.
Alternative Names:
Medical Cause, Causation Opinion
Why it Matters?
Causation rather than negligence is where most injury defenses succeed, because the fact of an incident is usually undisputed while its connection to the claimed condition frequently is not. The productive lines are preexisting conditions documented before the event, degenerative findings explaining symptoms independently, delayed symptom onset inconsistent with trauma, and treatment gaps suggesting the condition arose later.
Frequently Confused with
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
What standard applies to medical causation opinions?
What are the strongest causation defenses in injury cases?
