‘Supreme Court rules wrong diagnosis is not negligence,’ various website headlines  screamed breathlessly, piquing and alarming the likes of this author who have a deep professional and academic interest in all things medical negligence.

But is this truly the case? Has the Supreme Court of India actually held that wrong diagnosis isn’t actionable?

Not so fast.

The practice of law, one could well argue, is, for the most part, an exercise in semantics. The perennial tussle over the true meaning of words and phrases as they occur in judgements and statutes defines the discipline.

One thing that is critical to any enquiry as to the true meaning of words is context, which is often, sadly enough, the first casualty when journalists and bloggers are singularly focussed on beating their rivals to the punch.

Apparently, this is what happened recently when the Supreme Court upheld the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission’s finding in a medical-negligence complaint that the concerned medical practitioners had not been negligent. In the said case titled Vinod Jain vs. Santokhba Durlabhji Memorial Hospital and Anr. (civil appeal no. 2024 of 2019), the Supreme Court noted, with approval, that the NCDRC had found that the case at best was one of wrong diagnosis and not medical negligence (vide paras. 5 and 16).

Nowhere does the said judgement even come close to excluding en masse medical-negligence claims based on wrong diagnosis from the realm of actionability. All it says is that Vinod Jain (supra) could at best be categorised as a case of wrong diagnosis and not one of medical negligence.

Wrong diagnosis is not in and of itself medical negligence. The former is possible without the attempt at diagnosis falling below the applicable standard of care. Doctors can make bona fide mistakes. They can diligently factor in a patient’s history and symptoms, order all the right tests, and still get it wrong. Such honest mistakes – often arising out of a genuine diagnostic dilemma – cannot be said to constitute medical negligence.

For an instance of wrong diagnosis to rise to the level medical negligence, it must be a direct result of conduct below the applicable standard of care – for instance, the failure to order the appropriate diagnostic tests or to perform a differential diagnosis.

In fact, the proof of deviation from the applicable standard of care is a key requirement regardless of the nature of the medical-negligence claim. It applies equally to claims predicated on wrong diagnosis and those emanating from wrong treatment. No medical-negligence claim is legally sustainable absent proof of such deviation.

And that, too, isn’t adequate. A plaintiff must further prove that the deviation was what led to the injury in order to succeed.

Even the most perfunctory of ganders at the judgement in question would show that the Complainant eventually failed because both the NCDRC and the Supreme Court found no deviation from the applicable standard of care in the above case – and not because of a dictum excluding wrong diagnosis from the realm of actionable negligence altogether.

The journalists who reported on the case need to revisit their respective stories and rephrase them to expunge the misapprehension that they have been labouring under.

To claim, without any qualification, that wrong diagnosis isn’t negligence is incorrect. The correct position is that not every instance of wrong diagnosis constitutes negligence, or that wrong diagnosis isn’t in and of itself negligence.