earticle

영어

It has become a general idea today that the characteristics of medicine should be considered as a basis when discussing a medical personnel’s duty of care and whether or not it has been violated, and when discussing its duty of explanation and whether or not it has been fulfilled in medical practice. However, in the discussion of its characteristics, some shortcomings still exist, so the need for a re-discussion has been raised. Firstly, existing discussions on characteristics have failed to comprehensively grasp and explain the characteristics of medical practice. Secondly, in some researchers’ arguments, there are discrepancies between the terms used to express characteristics and their conceptual definitions or content. Thirdly, the lack of exemplified cases that reflect the characteristics of medicine - especially Supreme Court precedents - has led some to think negatively about the recognition and reflection of certain characteristics. In my early writings, I have described five characteristics of medical practice: ‘conflict in medical goals’, ‘initiating appropriate medical actions (progression of illness)’, ‘dynamics of medical intervention (diversity of symptoms)’, ‘diversity of medical effects’, ‘inherent risk of medical treatment (invasiveness)’. In this paper, keeping in mind the reasons for the need for reconsideration, I aim to analyze the characteristics of medicine in detail and cite key parts of representative Korean Supreme Court precedents that reflect each characteristic. The characteristics of medicine extracted from this paper are; There are ten factors, including the legitimacy of the essence of medical practice, timeliness of medical execution, dynamics of medical progress, diversity of medical effects, risk of medical invasion, non-uniformity of medical methods, limitations of medical capabilities, intervention of the medical subject, high degree of medical standards, and maldistribution of medical data.