AMA Journal of Ethics^®

What are insurance, contract, and criminal law implications of detecting Alzheimer’s disease early?

Medical expert witnesses are ethically and legally obligated to provide honest testimony that meets the standards of the Daubert test.

When called to consult or to testify at “sexually violent predator” hearings, medical professionals’ primary task is adapting recognized medical terminology to the SVP label; they are asked to shoehorn medical diagnoses into ill-fitting legal language.

The duty of forensic psychiatrists is to serve as objective experts to courts, but special circumstances in juvenile forensic evaluations and expectations about the patient-physician relationship may encourage confusion between the roles of forensic evaluator and treating psychiatrist.

Using evidence-based medical guidelines in courts will require confronting legal professionals' lack of training in assessing scientific evidence, the limitations of available evidence, and fundamental distinctions between the meaning of evidence in medicine and law.

The purpose of assessing dangerousness is to determine whether an individual poses a risk of endangering self or others now or in the near future and to identify what interventions are necessary to minimize that risk.

State medical boards, tend to follow social policy as expressed in U.S. law, which designates moral turpitude outside the clinic as a cause for restricting professional licenses.