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THE RIGHTS OF CANCER SUFFERERS

In the 1970s, when the United States was feeling the strong growth of civil rights awareness and an increase in medical litigation, medical practitioners published a proclamation on behalf of patients regarding the rights of patients to appeal for the restoration of human nature to the medical sector. It was said that this proclamation was meant to safeguard the rights of patients in psychiatric hospitals.

In 1971, the Mental Health Act of the State of Massachusetts adopted the proclamation of patients’ rights for the first time. In the following year, Pennsylvania Hospital of Boston distributed pamphlets on the rights of patients. Since then, in 1973, various proclamations of patients’ rights were drafted and issued, including the proclamation of patients’ rights of the American Hospital Association, the rights of children patients, operative patients and so on.

In view of such proclamations of rights in the USA, the campaign for patients’ rights spread to countries in other parts of the world. In 1981, the General Association of Physicians of the World made the Lisbon proclamation on patients’ rights. In 1983 patients’ rights and obligations were clearly stated in Chapter 4 of the manual of practicing physicians of Japan Hospital Association, a legal personal entity in Japan which, in the following year, announced the proclamation of patients’ rights. I would now like to present the foreword of the Japanese Proclamation of Patients’ Rights:

"Everyone has the right to be respected and to live healthily.

The basic human right is to receive the best medical service under the suggestion and assistance of medical practitioners and one’s own wish and choice in order to recover, maintain, and improve one’s health.

However in current medical healing, there are numerous patients who are examined and cured as if they were merely objects of medical behavior without being duly informed of the nature of disease and, as such, without due respect to human nature.

Moreover, the daily medical cure is to get medicine, examination, and the continuous medical acts. Life and health are not well protected. Even though the problem involves the different conditions peripheral to medical treatment, medical practitioners do not treat the patients in the primary roles while the patients themselves do not actively seek to be so treated, thus contributing to the causes.

Under the present situation, it is meaningful to express the rights of patients plainly and in full. Patients should endeavor to upkeep such rights. Medical practitioners should be supporters to such rights under the mission of society.

From the existing medical system we have to overcome improper political, social and economic restrictions, targeting better medical quality to come about. We trust that the proclamation of rights of patients represents the first step of co-operation between patients and medical practitioners."

(Foreword of the article, the proclamation of the rights of patients)

Against the background of this proclamation of rights, patients who had once expressed strong distrust of the medical environment and treatment have now gained common understanding of the same.

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