by Dr NICHOLAS PADFIELD consultant in anaesthesia and pain management at Guy’s & St Thomas’s NHS Trust
“Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience.”
There you have it: that is the core definition by the International Association for the Study of Pain.
by Dr MICHAEL GOSS MA MB BChir MD FRCP, consultant neurologist and founder member of the Expert Witness Institute (MEWI)
CONSULTANT neurologists undergo the longest training in clinical practice and it would be true to say that we never stop learning – both from advances in science and from our patients.
by Dr BASHIR QURESHI FRCPCH, FRCGP, expert witness in cultural, religious and ethnic issues in litigation, Community Child Health Medical Officer in London 1972-1998, medical member of child protection panels in London 1986-1998.
IT IS paramount for the legal assessment in a suspected child abuse case to select one or more appropriate expert witnesses. A cutback may prove to be a false economy.
by GRAHAM SIEVERS, communications manager of Concateno
THE ROAD safety campaign charity Brake chose to highlight the dangers of both drink and drug driving as its main theme for Road Safety Week, which runs every November. Its campaign poster read: Not a drag; not a drop. Its website states that a sixth of deaths that occur on the roads are due to drink-driving, and that researchers believe the same is true for drugdriving.
Dr PETER L G JENKINS FRCPsych, consultant psychiatrist, outlines some of the salient issues in the development of expert witness testimony in the field.
MY WORK AS an expert witness started when I became interested in mentally disordered offenders and worked as a fellow in forensic psychiatry in the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. In that role I was exposed to the whole range of criminal behaviour and provided assessments of fitness to plead and determinations of mental state to assist the court in pleas related to the verdict of guilty but mentally ill and not guilty by reason of insanity. An interesting part of my work at the time also involved civil litigation.
