Prescription for disaster: doctor ails to warn patient of drugs’ side effects

If someone in your family is hurt or killed in a car accident, you may be able to sue the at-fault driver’s doctor — if that physician failed to warn the driver of the hazards of taking certain prescription drugs before getting behind the wheel.

That’s what the state’s highest court said recently in the case of Coombes v. Florio.

The defendant in the case was a primary care physician who had prescribed his elderly patient several drugs with potential side effects of drowsiness, dizziness, lightheadedness, fainting and sedation.

The doctor never discussed the side effects with the patient or warned him not to drive.

One day, while running errands in his car, the elderly man lost consciousness. His car went off the road, hitting and killing a 10-year-old boy who was standing on the sidewalk with a friend.

The boy’s parents sued the man’s doctor, arguing that he had been negligent in not warning his patient of the dangers posed by taking prescription drugs and driving.

A trial judge ruled against the parents, finding that they couldn’t recover from the doctor because he owed absolutely no duty to the boy, who wasn’t his patient.

But, on appeal, the Supreme Judicial Court disagreed, ruling that “a physician owes a duty of reasonable care to everyone foreseeably put at risk by his failure to warn of the side effects of his treatment of a patient.”

The medications the doctor in the case prescribed, the court noted, “had known potential side effects ... that were likely to impair a motorist.”

Further, “the combination of drugs had the potential to result in ‘additive side effects’ that ... increased the likelihood that [the elderly patient]’s ability to drive would become [compromised].”

The physician had previously advised the patient after his recovery from cancer treatment “that he could safely resume driving, thereby making it all the more [likely] that an accident would occur,” the court stated.

In these circumstances, the court concluded,
“any duty that [the doctor] owed to warn of the side effects of medication he prescribed extended not only to [the patient], but to those whose injuries were foreseeably caused by the resulting accident.”

paul.lamoureux@exhibitAnews.com