Pacheco v. Ames

— This is a dental negligence case. There is no mystery about what happened. The defendant, Dr. John R. Ames, operated on the lower left side of patient Keith A. Pacheco’s mouth in an attempt to extract a wisdom tooth. As it turns out, there was no wisdom tooth in the lower left portion of Mr. Pacheco’s mouth. The factual dispute presented to the jury was not over what happened — Dr. Ames operated on the wrong side of Mr. Pacheco’s mouth. The question for the jury was rather whether that conduct was excused by Dr. Ames’s reasonable reliance on x rays for*914warded to his office by Mr. Pacheco’s…