Is there a legal difference between using pharmageddon or the implied meaning of the word pharmageddon? In one documentary's trailer, one doctor says, &quot;Let's be honest, a number of medical schools are run by pharmageddon.&quot; Pharmageddon doesn't literally mean anything, but it implies something. Is there any legal difference between a person using pharmageddon in the sentence above and a person using the exact implied meaning of the word pharmageddon in the sentence above?
Is there a legal difference between using pharmageddon or the implied meaning of the word pharmageddon? It depends on the context, wording, and substance of the &quot;implied meaning&quot;. If these are in the sense of the comments to your question, then there is no difference from a legal standpoint. The lawfulness of both alternatives is premised on the First Amendment, which protects free speech. Many other countries have in their legislation or Constitution equivalent provisions to protect the freedom of speech. Here, the invented term pharmageddon constitutes rhetorical hyperbole. A reasonable person would understand it not as a concrete entity controlling the medical schools, but as an adaptation from the Book of Revelation to give a connotation of doom or catastrophe in the context of medicine academics. The statement of fact &quot;[A] numer of medical schools are run by pharmageddon&quot; would not be actionable as defamatory because it does not sufficiently identify entities (such as specific pharmaceutical companies and/or medical schools) of which reputation is or could be harmed by that statement. Even if the publication singled out specific entities, actionability would depend on the veracity of the notion that the denounced dynamics hinder the schools' priority (i.e., academics &amp; research in medicine) and/or the righteousness the allegedly controlling entity is expected or required to maintain.
Informed consent is required for a surgical procedure. &quot;Informed&quot; includes having knowledge of the risks. The relevant legal question would be whether the doctor in question did adequately apprise the patient of the risks. On an individual basis, patient A could sue doctor X for the resulting harm. It is possible that 5 patients might sue the same doctor on this basis, which gets expensive and inefficient. If there is a well-defined and large-enough class, it may be possible for the action to be certified as a class action. 20 people might be a large-enough class. The defendant would be &quot;whoever is responsible for the wrong&quot;. That might be a single practitioner, or a hospital that the practitioner(s) work for. The hospital is an obvious plaintiff, if they failed in their duty to assure that their employees adequately informed patients of the risk.
They never legally existed According to True West magazine, no government ever issued a wanted poster containing the phrase “dead or alive”. The iconic posters were promulgated by private organisations railroads, Wells Fargo, Pinkerton etc. No doubt, if challenged, those organisations would argue that they were simply stating the terms under which the reward would be paid, not encouraging or condoning unlawful killing. Pre-modern societies had the legal concept of the “outlaw” which meant someone who was outside the protection of the law - they had no rights and anyone could do literally anything to them without legal consequence. It was effectively a death sentence. The legal use of outlaw is different from the colloquial use meaning a criminal. However, it had disappeared from use under English law (even if it was still theoretically possible) before the split with America and the due process clause would likely prevent its return. It was reintroduced in the Australian colonies to deal with frontier bushrangers where a magistrate could issue a warrant requiring a person to present themselves by a stated date or be declared outlaw. Even so, in practice most outlaws were apprehended and tried rather than shot on sight.
It doesn't matter. When a contract is left ambiguous the interpretation that is used is the one that is the most favorable to the party that did not draft the contract, under the logic that if the party that did draft the contract chose all the wording and thus, they could have stated their interpretation in the contract just avoided this whole mess in the first place. A similar rule exists in criminal law, where if the law is ambiguous, the interpretation used is the one most favorable to the defendant, since the state could have drafted it in a way that made their interpretation clear.
Numbering is for the sake of clarity, and is not intrinsically required. If you refer to a section, you need a way to say which section you mean, and a vague description like "up there where I talked about copying" is insufficient. You can refer to a section by a title, if you need to refer to sections within the contract, as long as your titles match what you refer to them as (and you don't have two sections called "Your Rights").
In the example given, both elements must be established. This is the most common meaning of the word &quot;and&quot; in a statute or rule or contract or other writing, but there are times when &quot;and&quot; does not have that meaning. One must always determine the meaning from context on a case by case basis. Words do not have a single universal meaning in all contexts for legal purposes. This variation by context in the meaning of words for legal purposes is especially frequent in countries with common law legal systems based upon the English legal system such as the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and India to have situations where a word often means one thing in one legal context and another thing in different legal contexts. This is because the governing statutes and case law are written on a piecemeal basis by many different people with no one in charge of maintaining stylistic uniformity, over a very long period of time (often centuries). In countries like those of Continental Europe, Latin America and much of Asia and Africa, which have what are called &quot;civil law&quot; systems, that are based on European civil codes, there are comprehensive codifications of the basic laws of the land that are drafted by experts all at the same time, and amended only with great deliberation and care, and these codes tend to use a word more consistently in most contexts than common law legislatures and judges do, although even then, this principle is not absolute.
The question of a patient's legal responsibility would arise under a negligence lawsuit, where the patient &quot;should have known&quot;. The standard for determining what things a person &quot;should have known&quot; is fluid, but obviously you can start with &quot;could have known&quot;. If a patient's can't know a fact, they cannot be said to have negligently contributed to the damage. Doctors are given these warnings, but patients are not, uniformly. It is therefore possible that a patient was never warned of the effects of an opioid prescription (I can personally attest to that lacuna in the system). Your assumption about the bottle being so labeled is only valid for the original supply bottles from which the pharmacist dispenses. However, there is also a rather compelling argument to the effect that no person in the US can in fact be unaware of the addiction risk of opioids. It is a defeasible argument, possibly applicable to a hypothetical person who has lived in complete isolation for decades. A patient is not required to undertake independent research in order to validate the science that underlies statutorily-mandated FDA approval or drugs, instead, the burden is assigned to the manufacturers and distributors (primarily doctors and pharmacists) to convey the relevant information. Thus HR 1026 would, if enacted, mandate a different warning. But the bill does not assert a lack of liability on either side, therefore the question reduces to the &quot;simple&quot; matter of determining if a person knew or should have known.
Yes, it’s legal Homeopathic “medicines” contain no active ingredients so they are effectively placebos. Placebo work for some patients some of the time but they don’t work if the patient knows what they are. For them to be effective they have to be kept secret. Most doctors from time-to-time and for various reasons prescribe placebos. The ethics of this practice is debatable but the legality isn’t - it’s totally legal.