Where a medical practitioner fails to warn of a specific genetic risk and that risk materialises but the patient's harm results from a different, unrelated medical event, the practitioner is not liable for the consequences of the unrelated event even though the patient would not have been in harm's way but for the failure to warn. The normative causation principles in Wallace v Kam apply to prevent accumulation of distinct risks. The right to plan a family recognised in Cattanach v Melchior can ground a claim for economic loss in the IVF context, but the scope of liability remains confined to harm from the specific risk about which the practitioner failed to warn.
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