Independent assessors in contrast to treating physicians as expert witnesses in Canada: comparing duties and responsibilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In civil and criminal proceedings, there are factors inherent in the role of a treating physician such as advocacy and other duties owed the patient, in contrast to expert opinion provided by an independent assessor which is required to be objective. Misunderstanding or unawareness of the differences in treating versus expert physicians can lead to decision-makers relying on potentially biased information. Recent decisions in Canada have allowed for opinion evidence by treatment providers (Westerhoff v. Gee Estate), which seem to ignore the potential bias of the treatment provider. The lack of clarity by which decision-makers perceive the role of physician witnesses poses a significant issue for physicians, who must balance competing interests, equivocal processes and concerns regarding bias and conflict of interest when providing medical information to a decision-maker. This paper attempts to clarify the essential differences between information provided by a treating physician as opposed to an expert opinion provided by an independent consultant in Canada. Discussion around privacy legislation will be used to highlight some differences. It is hoped that a clearer understanding of the information the decision-makers are receiving will promote an improved understanding of that information and, subsequently, an improved decision-making process.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".