Medico-legal Journal

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY: To discover the precise reasons for referring a doctor to the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service, and whether there are any disparities between referrals of international medical graduates and UK graduates. Further to consider whether understanding the precise reasons would provide insight into the nature of referrals. STUDY DESIGN: We collected and analysed the data from the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service website over a period of 12 months...

A judicial on-site examination is essential for the correct analysis of a forensic case, particularly when there has been a fatal fire, as heat-related changes to bodies make identification by the forensic pathologist and other specialists difficult along with estimating the post-mortem interval and determining the precise cause and manner of death. We systematically reviewed all relevant articles dating from 2003 to 2022 in the PubMed database with a view to updating recommendations on how best to proceed...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Human sacrifice is a gruesome and controversial practice where one or more individuals are killed as part of a religious ceremony or as a gift to a deity. While the practice has been widely condemned globally, it still persists in some communities in some countries. Nepal, in particular, has a history of animal sacrifice with larger offerings taking place every five years. While animal sacrifice is legal, the ultimate punishment for engaging in human sacrifice is a legal sentence. This article examines the historical and cultural context of sacrifice in Nepal and explores some contemporary cases of human sacrifice reported in the media...

Prompt and better primary examination of victims accompanied by meticulous note-taking in cases of suspected child sexual abuse are needed to improve both conviction rates and to avoid inappropriate criminal investigations and proceedings. The majority of child sexual abuse victims are female. More training is needed for gyaecologists in this field.

For consent to be fully informed, it must be tailored to each patient, who must be appraised of alternative treatments (including that of no treatment) and informed of the material risks which an individual would wish to know and consider significant. This also includes Covid-19 related risks. Whilst surgeons had at times to offer sub-optimal treatments due to pressures caused by the pandemic, patients should still be given the choice to delay their treatment. Consent obtained remotely via digital technology must comply with the same requirements as in a face-to-face setting...

Transformative processes generally occur singly and jointly involving the whole body. Rarely, they appear simultaneously as distinct transformative phenomena. The case study relates to a corpse found inside a storage tank in a rather unusual position, during the winter months. On external examination carried out at the crime scene, both legs and feet were out of the well bending over the storage tank and showing skeletonisation and tissue defects due to biting inflicted by the environmental macrofauna. The thighs were also skeletonised, inside the well but not immersed in the water, as was the torso which, however, was entirely corified...

Atractylis gummifera L. is a wild poisonous plant found in rural areas around the Mediterranean. It is also available from herbalists. This plant has a liver tropism which can be fatal whether taken orally or transcutaneously.In this case report, we report and discuss the clinical, biological and autopsy data of one case of poisoning of a small child in Morocco with a view to raising awareness of this dangerous poisonous glue thistle especially when used transcutaneously.

On 20 April 2022 the Sessions Court of Greater Mumbai sentenced a postpartum depressed woman to lifetime imprisonment for abandoning and murdering her twin girl child ( In re: The State of Maharashtra ). In the absence of a diagnosis or treatment for postpartum depression at the time when the crime was committed, a plea of insanity was denied. This article considers how the absence of services for perinatal mental health in India may challenge the delivery of criminal justice in cases of infanticide.

In the USA, intentional and accidental injuries are the most frequent causes of death in children. Many of these deaths could be avoided through preventive measures, and aetiological studies are needed to reduce fatalities. The leading causes of accidental death vary by age. We analysed all paediatric accidental deaths recorded by a busy urban Medical Examiner"s Office in Chicago, Illinois (USA). We searched the electronic database for accidental deaths in children aged under 10 between 1 August 2014 and 31 July 2019...

"Honour-killings" are the intentional execution of women who are perceived to have disrespected their families; in Nepal this is frequently considered socially acceptable while the United Nations condemns them as arbitrary executions that violate the right to life. In Nepal, "honour-killing" is typically a caste-based hate crime which is not limited to women as there have been reports of male victims as well. The perpetrators are sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, with the perpetrator serving 25 years...

In Nepal, police inquests have several limitations. When they receive information about a death, the police visit the crime scene and write an inquest report. Then, they arrange for the body to be autopsied. However, most autopsies are performed by medical officers in government hospitals who lack specialised training in conducting autopsies. Although all Nepalese medical schools teach forensic medicine to undergraduate students and require them to witness some autopsies, most private institutions are not authorised to perform them...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

People failing to give a specimen of breath at a police station are assumed to be deliberately obstructive and are charged with Failure to Provide under the Road Traffic Act 1988. However, spirometry records of 281,210 healthy individuals from UK BioBank showed that a significant minority cannot use existing evidential breath analysis machines. Women were three times more likely to be unable to use them than men (1.64% vs 0.54%) with the risk rising with age six-fold from those in their 40s (0.43%) to 2.7% in their 70s, with women more affected (0...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Cannabis is the most widely used illicit psychoactive substance in the world. In recent years, in many European Union countries, there has been a decriminalisation of the use and personal possession of cannabis for recreational purposes. There has been a spread of medical cannabis, as well as marketing of cannabis products at low concentrations of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (Delta-9-THC), the major chemical to which cannabis owes its psychotropic effect. The percentage limit of this substance, only recently set by the European Court of Justice, must be distinguished from the "doping dose" of Delta-9-THC, namely, the dose which causes psychotropic effect in the consumer...

A 6-year-old girl was brought to the emergency department with a history of an accidental fall a few days earlier. She presented with a fever, cough and constipation. Sars-CoV-2 infection being suspected, she was transferred to a paediatric facility for Covid-positive patients. During the diagnostic process, the clinical picture suddenly deteriorated with the development of bradycardia, tachypnea and altered sensorium. Despite cardiopulmonary resuscitation attempts, the child died about 16 hours after admission to the emergency department...

The National Health Service was set up to provide healthcare to every citizen, based not on the ability to pay, but on need. However, the Secretary of State for Health's duty under section 1 of the National Health Service Act 2006 to promote a comprehensive health service is to provide services that can be provided within the resources available. As those resources are not unlimited, it is necessary to ration them. The issue of rationing of resources in the NHS came up again in R (Wallpott) v Welsh Health Specialised Services Committee and Aneurin Bevan University Health Board [2021] EWHC 3291 (Admin)...

With medical litigation on the rise, physicians require a nuanced understanding of the legalities of consenting patients to reduce their liability while practising evidence-based medicine. This study aims to a) clarify the legal duties of gastroenterologists in the UK and USA when gaining informed consent and b) provide recommendations at the international and physician level to improve the consent process and reduce liability.A bibliometric analysis of the Web of Science database with the MeSH terms "gastroenterology" and "informed consent" yielded 383 articles, of which 228 were excluded due to not meeting the inclusion criteria...

Self-strangulation is an uncommon method of suicide. The body was found lying on the floor in front of the "multi-gym" inside the gym in the basement of the deceased's house. It was initially presented as a case of sudden death, but during autopsy, a ligature mark was noted over the deceased's neck and bilateral temporal regions along with findings supportive of ligature strangulation. A visit was made to the crime scene. A plausible reconstruction of events suggested that the deceased had used the metallic rope of the multi-gym for this purpose...