fraud professional-ethics academia crime duty-of-care
Why is it legal for professors to present out-of-date information as practical and fact, when doctors are expected to give patients the latest cures?
<p>Why is it illegal for doctors to not give the latest cure, keep in touch with the latest cures, find everything for the patient, but professors do not lose a practicing license as a result of teaching the out-of-date information and can tell their students (patients) to go figure out what prescription (information) they need themselves? Doing that as a doctor would be to tell their patients to die and succumb to nature.</p>
<p>Imagine if a doctor during a visit in clinic did not give a diagnosis but instead gives lectures about history of some disease and medicine starting from Roman history on how to cure your illness via medieval methods and told you that you have to build a medicine from scratch and cure yourself or use the medieval methods that they present as facts and current medicine, and you leave the doctor's office not having a prescription and have a bill of a couple thousand dollars.</p>
<p>A doctor has to show you the best cancer medicines available if you were to have cancer, but a professor may produce figures that are out-of-date and never update their lecture slides.</p>
<p>Professors often teach from historical perspectives minus the last 70 years' of new developments, and ask you to figure out everything new/practical yourself, and you pay them a hundred dollars or more per lecture.</p>
<p>I cannot name the law requiring professors to disclose if their lecture slides have out-of-date information but I am sure I can sue my doctor for prescribing a drug or handing me a drug that is out-of-date/was reverted to banned without telling me.</p>
<p>Imagine if your doctor treated you with the same contempt as a professor.</p>

<p>Because the law of negligence has developed to include a duty of care between physicians and patients and the standard of care encompasses the things you describe. The common law conceives of the doctor and patient in such a close relationship of neighbor-ness that it makes sense to impose such a duty. The harm that flows from breach of that duty is often reasonably foreseeable. Another distinction is that you come to a physician with an illness and expect care and they purport to deliver it. Their care and advice is often not a product/service that you might have the option of not buying. There is no competing legal duty that pulls the physician in any other direction than to meet the standard of care.</p>
<p>There is no corresponding duty of care between an instructor and student to instruct any particular syllabus content. It would be a novel addition to the common law if this were to be recongized. There is no standard of care dictating the content of the syllabus. Any obligation to deliver a particular syllabus would be placed on the professor by the university (perhaps further dicated by professional accrediting bodies).</p>
<p>I do not foresee the common law developing to include such a duty of care between professor and student. The value of academic freedom weighs against the law imposing a strict duty on syllabus content and the kind of harm that might flow from presenting out-of-date information is vague and not often reasonably foreseeable. Such a duty could give rise to a spectre of of indeterminate liability. And it isn't clear that the interest in presenting the latest and current theories always outweighs the interest in presenting a historical perspective. These are all reasons why I highly doubt the common law would ever evolve to recognize the duty you're proposing.</p>
