Did the district court err in sustaining the defendants’ motion for summary judgment?
In support of their motion for summary judgment on the issue of causation, the defendants offered published medical articles. In opposition to the motion for summary judgment, Rankin offered several affidavits, including the affidavit of Dr. Jeffrey Gross, a neurosurgeon. Whose testimony was underlaid with his opinion that the longer a compressive spinal cord injury existed without remediation, the less likely the patient would regain lost neurological function. Gross said he was trained to understand that spinal cord compression constituted a surgical emergency, and he had applied that training to his own practice. Gross noted that the phrase “the sooner, the better,” as applied to when a patient should undergo surgical decompression of a disk herniation, was not a “vague or cavalier statement.” He stated that a reasonable neurosurgeon would agree that surgical decompression of a thoracic disk herniation causing spinal cord compression with neurological symptoms should occur within a
