Court Opinion

ID: 9588193
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:31:21.286856+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:00:56.271878
License: Public Domain

SMITH, Presiding Judge,
concurring specially.
I fully concur in the majority opinion and all that is said there. I agree that the testimony of the expert witness, Dr. Edelberg, was insufficient to survive a directed verdict because he improperly based his opinion upon an assumption that was contradicted by all the evidence presented at trial, because it countered direct evidence with merely circumstantial evidence, and because it was improperly based upon a “differential diagnosis” that did not eliminate all other causes of the injury. I concur specially to note that his testimony is also insufficient to survive a directed verdict because Dr. Edelberg’s lack of credentials and his failure to review or consider the evidence in the case before us are so profound that no weight should be given to his testimony.
The trier of fact may “consider the expert’s credentials and then give such weight and credit to the expert’s testimony as it sees fit.” McCoy v. State, 237 Ga. 118,119 (227 SE2d 18) (1976); see also Adams v. State, 275 Ga. 867, 868 (3), n. 8 (572 SE2d 545) (2002). At the time of trial, this witness’s only teaching position was at an unaccredited offshore medical school; he was not paid and had never taught a class there, only visiting the school once. He was on staff at a hospital in Maryland, where he was hired to revive a failing OB-GYN residency but failed in that attempt. He testified at trial that he was leaving that position and was not credentialed in the state to which he planned to move. He withdrew from the board recertification process due to the risk of losing his existing certification if he failed, and he *898twice failed board certification in maternal fetal medicine. In addition, he has never published on the topic of shoulder dystocia in a peer reviewed journal. He has very little recent obstetrics experience, and he has refused to submit his conclusions to expert witness peer review.
Decided March 28, 2008
Reconsideration denied April 10, 2008
Joseph H. King, Jr., for appellant.
Alston&Bird, Judson Graves, VictoriaD. Lockard, for appellees.
Peters & Monyak, Robert P. Monyak, Jeffrey S. Bazinet, amici curiae.
Moreover, Dr. Edelberg acknowledged that he merely “scampered” through the medical case records before giving his opinion in his deposition. He changed his opinion at trial on the crucial issue of when he believed the defendant’s alleged negligence occurred. His theories of causation and management of cases with shoulder dysto-cia, as the trial court noted and the expert himself acknowledged, are directly contrary to those taught by the textbooks, residency programs, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and his theories have never been subjected to peer review.
Finally, Dr. Edelberg agreed that he does not “care what the medical records say” or “what the doctor said in his or her deposition” with regard to what actually occurred during delivery. He also testified that “[i]t does not matter to me” and he “will not accept” the testimony of the other eyewitnesses in the room that the doctor never pulled on the baby’s head after shoulder dystocia was diagnosed. His opinion was thus offered based upon few, if any, qualifications and his acknowledged refusal to accept the facts in evidence. Under these circumstances, it was wholly unworthy of belief.
For all these reasons, I specially concur.