Doctors can be like a normal person and committ crimes. Major of the medical errors are due to the system bad management.

On the other way, we need to decriminalize the medical profession. We need doctors

Dear Andre: in Argentina, if yo probe that a medical act was performed by imprudence, negligence or without due expertise it can be considered  a criminal ofense, whether it only provokes physical or psychological damage (art. 94 Criminal Code)  whether it ends in patient's death. (art. 84 CP). From long ago we are discussing medical doctor's criminal responsability in those cases. Some of us believe that criminal process is usually used as a way to preconstitute probes (as it comes before civil suit) and as a way to pressure for an arrangement in civil suit (if you are found guilty in criminal process then you can´t argue civil responsability, you just argue money compensation)........this situation makes medical doctors feel really afraid of liability and fell in a bad medical practice which is called "defensive medicine"........medical doctors feel that nobody is going to sue them because they do things in the patient (studies and medical procedures, even though they may be not necessary) but somebody can sue them because of what they don't do.........Argentine society is a very controversial and one, and generally speaking, sues a lot.

Cheers. Susie.

Medicine has been evolving in leaps, and the practical consequence

for that is changing of social behavior, the creation of new practices, and

the need to deal with dilemmas once only a product of science fiction. In

vitro fertilization, cloning techniques, the manipulation of stem cells, genetic

engineering, nanotechnology, and the deciphering of the human genome

are just part of an almost endless list of medical advances that have

generated controversy and have created issues that must be dealt with by

ethical and legal regulations.

Law and medicine-two of the most ancient sciences known to mankind-

have had a historically troubled coexistence, with conflicting views

and concepts for the same issues. And these differences have grown even

stronger in the last six decades as a result of a technological revolution in

the field of medicine.

And the law can only change when required, or perhaps provoked, by

these social movements, to define new limits, limitations, and rules. In

other words, it must provide a solution to newly created conflicts. But it

takes time. Between these two points of the journey, there is uncertainty,

legal breaches, and conflict.

Not only Brazil, but the whole world is suffering from the effects of

these troubled times, where law and medicine struggle to define the new

shape of the legal rules regulating healthcare. That is exactly why bioethics

and medical law have become so prominent in the last few years.

EDUARDO DANTAS. A BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATERS: THE DEVELOPMENT OF MEDICAL MALPRACTICE LITIGATION IN BRAZIL

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/27051/1/politics_of_patents_and_drugs_in_Brazil_and_Mexico_%28LSERO%29.pdf

I think that Law is never going to get at the same pace as Medicine.......and that's a good thing, in my own point of view.  I always tell my students that Medicine is like a Ferrari, and Law is a bike........The duty of law is to provide a common ground that assures the most important principles that a society thinks are so relevant  that MUST be protected by law  (eg: human rights). But Law  -understood as formal law, the one approved by Congress- is not called to regulate medical knowlodge and scientific development, these issues should be regulated by protocols and  ethical norms, "material laws". Law has to go along the path with Medicine,  guaranteeing the conditions for doctors to exercise Medicine and to gain scientific knowledge, stand by its side, but never impose what Medicine is called to decide in science, applying scientific principles.