"Introduction. In Romania legal medicine suppose professional activities as forensic pathologist and legal doctor are facing victims that request documenting traumatic lesions if any or sexual abuses, prejudices, working capacity, malpraxis, etc. Objective. The objective of our work is to determine the special kind of doctor-patient relationship in clinical legal medicine and to analyze the ethical influences. Material and methods. More than 1500 cases of medico-legal examinations are performed in the National Institute of Legal Medicine Mina Minovici in Bucharest each year. Most of them are domestic violence requests or car accidents. Discussions. In the late 30 years (Ezechiel JE, Linda LE, JAMA 1992) found out 4 different relationship models that may be applied in medical practice; the paternalistic model (the patient accepts his doctor as his legal and moral representative), informative model (the patient expresses his autonomy), interpretative model (the doctor is a good friend in need) and the deliberative model of self-construction of the knowledge that the patient must have in order to have a voluntary decision. Conclusions. In clinical legal medicine the patient is not only a patient but a victim also. Therefore, the relationship is double folded. With his patient the legal doctor develops initially an informative model, then an interpretative model. With his victim the doctor develops initially a paternalistic approach (passive character type) or an informative one (active character type), usually an interpretative model as most highly requested (What would you do if you were I?) or the deliberative model when evaluating prejudices, etc. "
Clinical legal medicine - community health outreach, results of a follow-up pan-European survey
