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In this article, previous rulings related to the Article 20 will be reviewed to analyze how the court made a judgment in regard to the “face-to-face consultation”. Before the analysis, the legal intent of the Article 20 (paragraph 2) will be described. For example, Professor Norio Higuchi, Faculty of Law, the University of Tokyo (who holds the chair of medical laws at Faculty of Law, the University of Tokyo since 2008) says “the intent of the Article 20 is to prohibit a physician from conducting a certain practice without his/her medical examination, attendance or postmortem” (Higuchi et al., 1975).
Professor Norio Higuchi also says the significance of the Article 20 is “in a part thereof stipulated to prevent medicine from being performed without an evidence (so-called No-EBM: No Evidence based Medicine), specifically, a part which prohibits a physician from providing medical treatment or issuing a medical prescription without performing a face-to-face consultation for an ordinary patient”.
Among legal actions against violation of the Article 20, the following three precedents were extracted as a specific type in which the Article 20 becomes a point of issue in a medical malpractice suit.