[xdmr]

> "I'm not a medical doctor, but here is a bunch of medical advice that should be used to prosecute this defendant." It doesn't sound that great either way.

Yeah, it sounds like something the opposition's lawyer should try to prevent being accepted as expert witness testimony. I'm not a lawyer, but I have seen "My Cousin Vinny" so I understand that there are procedures for doing this.

On the other hand, maybe the opposition's lawyer wasn't able to prevent the witness from being accepted as an expert because the witness actually was an expert and ought to have been accepted as an expert, in spite of not being a doctor. Maybe she was a professor of pharmacology or something. Thus she could justifiably claim to say with expertise "X drug would be very likely to kill a patient of type T and should not be prescribed to them." But this sounds a lot like medical advice (I mean, a person with condition T who heard the testimony might decide not to take drug X), even though it isn't. It's expert witness testimony.

We try to prevent people from giving medical advice without a license because medical advice tends to be given in private to people who tend to trust it implictly and will thus suffer the consequences of it being dangerously wrong. When medical advice is given in public in front of a hostile enemy lawyer, this is less of a concern.