Court Opinion

ID: 9662879
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 23:20:50.029612+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:14:41.903145
License: Public Domain

David Newbern, Justice, concurring. In Lane v. Lane, 295 Ark. 671, 752 S.W.2d 25 (1988), a course of treatment consisting of negligent acts in the form of improper injections continued until less than two years prior to the filing of the action. In this case the only treatment rendered by the doctor occurred more than two years before the action was filed unless it can be said that leaving the brace on Mr. Taylor constituted continuing treatment. I would be willing to join the court’s opinion if it were limited to that simple conclusion. I am, however, able to concur only in the result because I believe the opinion may mislead future litigants. The majority opinion quotes the description of the “continuous treatment” doctrine we applied in Lane v. Lane, supra. It then says we recognized it was to be applied in “appropriate circumstances.” Then follows a series of citations to cases which have applied the doctrine. There is no stated recognition that the problem in this case is whether Dr. Phillips’s inaction subsequent to placing the brace on Mr. Taylor constituted “treatment.” That is the issue, and it is a close one in the context of our medical malpractice statute of limitations which begins to run “the date of the wrongful act complained of and no other time.'''’ Ark. Code Ann. § 16-114-203(b) (1987) (emphasis supplied). It should not be assumed by those reading the court’s opinion that as long as a doctor-patient relationship continues, or there is a continuous course of non-treatment or omission, the statute does not begin to run. A review of the cases cited in the majority opinion shows that they do not support such a conclusion in a jurisdiction which has a statute such as ours. In Samuelson v. Freeman, 75 Wash.2d 894, 454 P.2d 406 (1969), the Supreme Court of Washington admitted that “[a]n intrinsic quality of imprecision has emerged in the statute of limitations as it affects allegations of medical malpractice” as a result of some of its decisions and that this case “is not likely to make the statute seem more precise.” The action was filed more than three years after Dr. Freeman had performed an operation. At the time the case was decided, apparently the general Washington three-year statute of limitations, R.C.W. 4.16.080(2), applied. No citation to it appeared in the opinion. (The statute was revised in 1971 to include a discovery rule.) The complaint at first alleged negligence in performance of the operation. It was amended at trial to allege “negligence in the examination, diagnosis, treatment and care, including negligent failure to diagnose and properly treat a bone infection” during the three years prior to the filing of the action. The Washington Supreme Court applied the continuous treatment doctrine but did not specify whether any “acts” of treatment occurred during the three-year period. The Court wrote that the doctrine would make “a sensible corollary” to the discovery rule, a rule which this court has clearly rejected, as we noted in the Lane case. In Farley v. Goode, 219 Va. 969, 252 S.E.2d 594 (1979), which we cited and relied upon in the Lane case, the Virginia Supreme Court made it clear that “by ‘continuous treatment’ we do not mean mere continuity of a general physician-patient relationship; we mean diagnosis and treatment ‘for the same or related illnesses or injuries, continuing after the alleged acts of malpractice. . . .”’ The court noted parenthetically “that the rule applied . . . presupposes that a continuous course of improper examination or treatment which is substantially uninterrupted is proved as a matter of fact.” It was noted that where the malpractice complained of constitutes a single, isolated act, however, the continuous treatment doctrine would not apply. In that case, a dentist had misdiagnosed the patient and had continuously done so into the statutory period while continuously working on her teeth and assuring her that she had no problem. Vinklarek v. Cane, 691 S.W.2d 108 (Tex. Civ. App. 1985), was a summary judgment case. The court of appeals found there was evidence from which a fact question persisted as to whether continuing treatment had occurred. The evidence was that the doctor had seen the patient on several occasions after the original treatment for a lung infection. On some of them his notes reflected continued diagnosis of that problem and prescription for it. The court noted the distinction between a continuation of negligent acts and seemed to conclude that continuous treatment could include the facts presented, just as we did in the Lane case. The applicable Texas statute of limitations, Vernon’s Ann. Texas Civ. St. art. 4590i, was unlike ours. It specifically included the continuous treatment doctrine and made no reference to a negligent act. The majority opinion states that Waldman v. Rohrbaugh, 241 Md. 137, 215 A.2d 825 (1966), “stated that where the facts show continuing medical or surgical treatment for a particular illness or condition in the course of which there is malpractice producing or aggravating harm, the patient’s cause of action accrues at the end of the treatment for that particular illness, injury or condition, unless he knew sooner or reasonably should have known of the injury or harm, in which case the limitation starts to run with actual or constructive knowledge.” That was not the holding of the case. The trial court had granted a doctor’s motion for judgment on the pleadings. The Maryland Court of Appeals noted that there was no such motion recognized in Maryland practice. It did not reverse or affirm the case, but simply remanded it to the trial court to allow the plaintiff to amend his pleading. In the course of the opinion, the Maryland court discussed in favorable terms both the continuous treatment doctrine and the discovery doctrine. It seemed to be recommending the discovery rule which, of course, we have specifically rejected because of the language of our statute. In Metzger v. Kalke, 709 P.2d 414 (Wyo. 1985), the court recognized the continuing treatment doctrine, but there was no question about when treatment ended. Wyoming is a discovery rule state, and the only real issue in the case turned out to be whether discovery was presumed to have occurred when the husband of the patient sought advice of an attorney with respect to suspected malpractice before evidence was obtained from which malpractice might have been shown. Other than a general statement of the continuous treatment doctrine, in obiter dictum, the case seems to have no bearing on the one before us now. Again, I feel future litigants should be warned that the language of the majority is broader than the facts of this case, or the holding in the Lane case justify. See Note, 11 UALR L.J. 405 (1988-89).