Unless our plaintiff has some serious medical condition unmentioned in the briefs or record, the slight elevation above the normal range that he may have experienced dur‐ing a three‐week period (we cannot say, on the basis of a single reading, that he did experience it) would not have produced the symptoms of which he complains or have en‐dangered his long‐term health. “The prolonged elevation of either the systolic or the diastolic blood pressure causes damage. If mildly elevated over a long period of time, or if highly elevated over a short period of time, damage results to a variety of different ‘target’ organs in the body, primarily due to arterial injury.” 2 Dan J. Tennenhouse, Attorneys Medical Deskbook § 24:4 (4th ed. 2012) (emphasis added); see also Norman M. Kaplan, Clinical Hypertension 124–25 (9th ed. 2006); Cleveland Clinic, “Pulmonary Hypertension: Causes, Symptoms, Diagnosis, Treatment,”
http://my.clevelandclinic.org/disorders/pulmonary_hypertension/hic_pulmonary_hypertension_causes_symptoms_diagnosis_treatment.aspx. The plaintiff experienced not highly elevated blood pressure for a short time or mildly elevated blood pressure for a long time, but mildly elevated blood pressure for a short time.
Hypertension is a serious condition. Untreated it can result in strokes or heart attacks. But a slight elevation above the normal range in an otherwise healthy young person (like the plaintiff) for three weeks will not bring on a stroke or heart attack or even materially increase the risk of a stroke or heart attack forty or fifty years later.
The deposition of the physician who took the plaintiff’s blood pressure on March 9 does not help the plaintiff’s case. Regarding the March 9 reading of 142/78, she said (consistent with the medical literature that we’ve cited): “I cannot say it’s a very serious, you know, condition, but it is a condition where the patient needs to take his medications.” The record refers to readings of 146/90 on two occasions in May. Although these readings were higher than the March 9 reading, the physician said that the plaintiff “would not have any symptoms with this kind of blood pressure. Seldom do you see patients with symptoms with this kind of blood pressure.”
Upon this very thin basis—the district court record con‐tains not a single reference to medical literature—the plain‐tiff’s lawyer (who acknowledged at oral argument that he had not himself conducted any research into hypertension, and whose brief contains no references to any medical litera‐ture) builds an edifice of alarm. He says that his client “be‐gan to suffer bloody noses, loss of vision and visual disturbances, and further could have suffered even more severe ailments such as stroke or even death.” The proposition that his client’s not taking his blood pressure medicine for three weeks might have killed him has no medical support in the record or the medical literature.
The magistrate judge thought the plaintiff could in a trial have presented evidence permitting “a reasonable inference that [the plaintiff’s] need for medication between February 27 [we don’t understand the choice of that date rather than February 15] and March 6, 2009, was objectively serious.” The district judge agreed that the plaintiff “suffered from an objectively serious medical condition.” These observations are irrelevancies. Hypertension is a serious medical condition because of the long‐term damage that it can do. But the issue in this case is whether the withholding of treatment during a brief period in the early stages of the condition in an otherwise healthy man in his mid‐twenties was likely to cause serious, or indeed any, harm. The disconnect between the underlying condition and the interruption in medication is underscored by the fact noted earlier that in May, two months after the interruption had ended, the plaintiff’s blood pressure was higher than it had been during the interruption.
Like the lawyers, the two judges made no reference to any medical literature. They could have skipped all medical questions, relying entirely on the lack of evidence of deliberate indifference by either defendant. But if they were going to venture an opinion on the “objective seriousness” of the plaintiff’s “medical condition,” they had to get the condition right—which was not hypertension but the medical consequences, in fact negligible, of a three‐week deprivation of medicine for mild, early‐stage hypertension. No matter how serious a medical condition is, the sufferer from it cannot prove tortious misconduct (including misconduct constituting a constitutional tort) as a result of failure to treat the condition without providing evidence that the failure caused injury or a serious risk of injury. For there is no tort—common law, statutory, or constitutional—without an injury, actual or at least probabilistic. Rozenfeld v. Medical Protec‐tive Co., 73 F.3d 154, 155–56 (7th Cir. 1996); Buckley v. Fitz‐simmons, 20 F.3d 789, 796 (7th Cir. 1994); cf. Codd v. Velger, 429 U.S. 624 (1977) (per curiam). (“A probabilistic harm, if nontrivial, can support standing.” Walters v. Edgar, 163 F.3d 430, 434 (7th Cir. 1998), and cases cited there.) As explained in Williams v. Liefer, 491 F.3d 710, 714–15 (7th Cir. 2007), “In cases where prison officials delayed rather than denied medical assistance to an inmate, courts have required the plain‐tiff to offer ‘verifying medical evidence’ that the delay (rather than the inmate’s underlying condition) caused some degree of harm. That is, a plaintiff must offer medical evidence that tends to confirm or corroborate a claim that the delay was detrimental” (citations omitted).
To determine the effect on the plaintiff’s health of a temporary interruption in his medication, the lawyers in the first instance, and if they did their job the judges in the second instance, would have had to make some investment in learning about the condition. That could have taken the form of a judge’s appointing a neutral expert under Fed. R. Evid. 706, or insisting that the plaintiff’s lawyer obtain an expert’s affidavit, or just consulting a reputable medical treatise. The legal profession must get over its fear and loathing of science.
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To which I say, "Amen, Brother."
