[Insurance medicine - an overview from the Swiss perspective]

Since the middle of the 19th century insurance medicine has played a role in medical risk assessment and underwriting for insurance applications, and since the beginning of the 20th century medical professionals have been assisting social insurance institutions with claims adjustments. However, insurance medicine has not yet become firmly established within the medical community. This may to a large extent be related to the fact that insurance medicine is not in itself curative and therefore tends to be sidelined by clinical subjects, while little or no teaching time is dedicated to the topic during basic and advanced training. A few institutions do offer training on the topic, although this is generally limited to the respective arrangements for claims and risk assessment. These factors result in insurance medicine being treated as a fragmented subject with no clear or consistent definitions, leaving it devoid of identity. This article begins by tracing the broad outlines of the history of insurance medicine, before offering a comprehensive definition and description of insurance medicine and providing information on the existing training opportunities and institutions concerned with insurance medicine.