Prospects

In forensics, which is widely related to the protection of human rights and social risk management, the fundamental concept and goal of forensic medicine is to think about medicine and healthcare and other related systems from the perspective of protecting every individual’s human rights and maintaining fairness and the interest of the community, while maintaining collaboration with various relevant disciplines with overlapping objectives, such as health care risk management studies, medical law, compensation science and medicine, and life ethics, and to comprehensively and inter-disciplinarily give back to society through forensic practices.

For this, unless the academic information and know-how obtained in forensic practices in each facility reflect the advances in medical science and have a high commonality, they will not be accepted as “scientific and fair medical judgements”.

The prerequisites for this are updated forensic pathology and practical forensic toxicology that include biochemistry and molecular pathology. The importance of toxicology has been indicated frequently whenever there is a “failure”, but no signs of fundamental improvement have been seen at all.

It is necessary for us and the society as a whole to now thoroughly think about ways to respond to these challenges. Medical education that arouses an abnormal interest in the “investigation of the cause of death” and that makes one think that any doctor can thoroughly perform an autopsy or diagnose injury is not desirable.

In research, what is important is planning with the goal that the autopsy data of a “person” should provide to medical treatments and society. In medico-legal judgment, experts should include one’s own discretion and not trust books unquestioningly; further, they should apply practical experience and expertise, based on the latest objective clinical analysis data through validation of oneself and others through research and consider it as the foundation of their “scientific and fair medical judgements”. The transfer of this know-how should be the principle of education and on-the-job training.