Medicine and law
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America's health care system is characterized by unacceptably high cost, inequity, and insufficient technology assessment. Cost containment has failed in part because of misunderstanding of the nature of the health care system. ⋯ Explicit, systematic rationing of health care services is one way to radically alter the existing system; the instituting of some type of national health program is another. Less drastic measures include systematic technology assessment; growing emphasis on group medical practice; more preventive services; and malpractice reform, including exploration of no-fault legislation and an expanded federal role.
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Case Reports
Gene technology in medical diagnostics and criminal procedure and liability for malpractice in Germany.
The increasing employment of gene technological procedures in medical diagnostics and criminal procedure has forced both the medical and the legal professions to focus their attention on the complex question of liability of physicians, lab technicians, and other personnel involved in applying these measures. This article gives an outline, by citing practical cases, of the major aspects of liability for malpractice that are relevant under German law. Bearing in mind that this article will be read predominantly by members of the Anglo-American common-law legal system, the legal aspects - even though they are German legal aspects - are viewed in the light of the common law. The article examines three major issues: (a) liability for diagnoses employing gene technological procedures: (b) liability for wrong testimony based on 'genetic finger-printing': and (c) the donor's rights concerning his or her DNA-probe.
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Medicine has developed rapidly during the last decades. Transplantation, sex-change surgery in transsexual or heterosexual persons, interference in the process of reproduction of human species and procedures like lobotomy have remarkably expanded the possibilities of contemporary medicine. This, at the same time gives rise to unprecedented legal problems. ⋯ The road to their solution, however, is full of blind curves: no sooner does the law offer an answer to one problem than medicine demands the answer to another, brand new one. This is why knowledge of these problems' regulation in different countries might be of use. That article gives an outline of their regulation in Czechoslovakia.
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Some of the background to the present structure of medicine in South Africa, an outline of some economic aspects of our current (inadequate) health care service and tentative suggestions regarding the directions in which our health services should be moving to facilitate the legitimization (political) and accumulation (economic) processes required to meet the needs and demands of all the people of an internationally recognized, just and free South Africa are presented.
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As a form of ritualized behaviour, the burial promotes and maintains the emotional well-being of the individual and the social cohesion of the group. Sources of burial law in Southern Africa are summarized and the present legal situation with regard to burial is given in some detail. ⋯ From paleolithic times to the present, man has responded to the death of his fellow man with solemnity and ceremony. The event of death has evoked not only a religious awe in men, but its threat to the survival of communal life has also engendered fear, just as its disruption of family life has aroused sorrow.'