In January 2014, the Appellate Court for the Third Judicial District, Illinois, took up the question of just how much the plaintiff’s causation expert needs to say in order to survive a directed verdict in a medical malpractice case alleging loss of chance of survival following a failure to diagnose cancer.  In overturning a directed verdict in favor of the defendant physicians, the appellate court ruled that a plaintiff can survive a directed verdict by having an expert combine survival data from the American Cancer Society, with an opinion that the negligent failure to diagnose the decedent’s cancer caused the decedent’s chances for survival to decrease from the difference between the average age of survival for a less advanced stage and the average age of survival for the stage determined at the time of diagnosis.  The expert needs to give an opinion to a reasonable degree of certainty as to the stage of the cancer at the time of the negligent failure to diagnose.  The plaintiff’s expert need not opine that the negligence deprived the patient of a better outcome or that the patient would likely have survived with a proper diagnosis.  This was found to be true even when the proffered expert admits that the statistics cannot predict what will happen in any particular case.  The fact that the “expert” was not an oncologist and had only seen a few cases of (cervical) cancer in her career was held to go only to the weight of the opinion.