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Comment by edaemon | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, the submission title ("Minnesota court decision means doctors can be sued by patients they don't see") does not match the article's title, nor does it really match its argument.

From the article:

>The court concluded that Justin Warren did not have to prove that his mother was in a doctor-patient relationship with Dinter in order to proceed to trial. This was unquestionably the correct decision.

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The article title is baity, so the submitter correctly changed it in accordance with the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I'm not clear on how the title doesn't match the article? It's consistent with language in the opening paragraph. I changed "see" to "treat", though, since that's more specific.

I don't think the title here needs to be changed significantly, I was just pointing out that it implies something different from the article contents.

The title paints the court's decision as if it's about treatment while the decision is actually about assessment. Going by the title one could think anyone could sue a doctor despite never interacting with them, while the article explains that this decision allows you to sue if you are actively refused treatment based on a doctor's assessment (the implication being that the doctor was wrong when they refused to admit/treat you).

Perhaps a better title would be something like "Minnesota court decision means doctors can be sued by patients they refuse to treat".

The main message of the article is more about how doctors routinely deny admission of patients to their hospitals without actually seeing them, and how this is a very strange practice that in this case might have lead to an avoidable death (and certainly to a more agonizing end as no palliative treatment was possible).

The title speaks only of the fairly common sense ruling that actively denying admission constitutes a clinical decision

This would be acceptable: "Minnesota court decision means doctors can be sued by patients they choose not to treat"

Current title sounds like patients can sue random doctors.

I think the title chosen by the submitter is editorializing. There's a question of whether or not diagnosis amounts to treatment, and a less editorialized title might read ".. doctors can be sued for misdiagnosing patients they don't have a formal relationship with" however that isn't even really correct, since the doctor in question was acting in a formal capacity when he made the diagnosis.

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