Medical residency in forensic medicine: objectives

Abstract

Legal Medicine is usually seen as a specialty that only “deals with cadavers”; however, the field entails much more than this: it aids in the science of norms, law, applying medical-biological knowledge, such that society can greatly improve in relation to justice. In daily practice, a specialist in legal medicine uses medical science to clarify facts that are of interest in judicial or administrative cases. Thus, it utilizes all aspects of medical knowledge, extrapolating, at times, to other areas of biological science. It functions as medical expertise of any nature that constitutes elements of proof that are fundamental, when the norms (penal, civil, administrative etc.) require medical knowledge to be established. The education of a medical expert requires, besides medical knowledge and an adequate understanding of the law, apprenticeship training and the domain of specific criteria, that establishes a link between medical and judicial parameters. In Brazil, this education is lacking and deformed. The principal objective of the residence program in Legal Medicine is to educate a professional capable of acting in the diverse segments that make up Legal Medicine, aiming to resolve judicial problems, in the area of medical expertise, as is shown in the present article.