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KMID : 1234820170180020047
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Korean Society of Law and Medicine
2017 Volume.18 No. 2 p.47 ~ p.73
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Medical Certificate as an Evidence of Personal Injury
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Lee Dong-Jin
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Abstract
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Medical certificate is a document to demonstrate a patient’s health status, made up and signed by a physician, dentist, or oriental physician who attended the patient. It serves as an evidence in many official process including civil or criminal law suit, especially for one’s personal injury. The Korean legal system also acknowledges and protects the evidentiary function of medical certificate by mandating physicians etc. to issue medical certificate in good faith and only when they personally attended the patient, and by criminally punishing them when they do not comply with these legal requirements. There are some reasons, however, that medical certificates often do not reflect the true health status of the patient: When physicians attend the patient and collect information regarding the health status of the patient, their priority is and should be the most cost-effective way to meet the health needs of the patient. It does not necessarily correspond to the accurate examination of the health status of the patient. Even when the patient’s report on the history of the illness or the injury seems suspicious, physicians might have to avoid disproving it because that kind of attitude might harm the rapport between the physician and the patient. All these can distort the perception of the physicians and this distortion can be reproduced in the medical certificate they made up. Some of these problems might be resolved or at least enhanced by introducing new form of medical certificate which would guide physicians to reveal the nature, factual and theoretical grounds, and the limit of their findings more accurately. Others, however, would not be able to address, because it stems from the conflict between the physician’s primary duty, duty to be loyal to the patient’s life and health, and his secondary duty to serve as a public or neutral witness on the health status of the patient, and when both values or duties conflict with each other, they should choose the duty to the patient sacrificing the duty to the public or the court.
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KEYWORD
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medical certificate, evidentiary function, conflict of interest, personal injury
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