[Responsibilities of physicians in legal practice with emphasis on civil law]

Medical doctors and lawyers respectively are very often directed to cooperate in many different ways. It is worth informing the medical doctors in a simple and understandable way of a newer and more recent practice of the term of responsibility and its usage in legal practice. Placing subjective or objective medical doctors' responsibility arises a considerable doubt in practice. Author's opinion is that the legal practice should keep the subjective responsibility because it is precisely the subjective responsibility that has a supremacy over the objective one. He is, of course, taking into consideration the honorable medical profession which shouldn't professionally constraint the doctors in doing their honorable work by confronting them with ethical and professional dilemma about whether they would be burdened with criminal or civil responsibility, and all that on the assumption of lege artis. The author has himself searched and checked the archive and Internet records of 200 court rulings of the Municipal Court in Zagreb and the District Court in Zagreb. He also searched Internet records of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Croatia both for the civil law responsibility as for the criminal law one. The figures shown in this work are appriximate and they are to be used as guidelines and support for indentifying and solving problems both in medical as in legal practice. After checking the court rulings of the Municipal Court in Zagreb the author has noted that the mistakes most frequently occur in the field of diagnostics and additional health care (42%), in performing a surgery and post-operative complications (43%) and in the field of ginecology (15%). With the developpement of medicine and technology the risks and medical mistakes are ever growing. However, maybe one simple conversation between a doctor and a patient before and after providing medical services would solve many of the dilemmas and reduce the unreasonable expectations.