Reversal Of Burden Research Articles

Telematics services and telemedicine under ophthalmological legal aspects

Telemedical solutions are increasing with respect to diversity, frequency and scope. It should be part of medical practice to remind again and again that telemedicine does not represent aspecial medical field or even asubspecialty. The concept of telemedicine is more used as asuperior term for different medical care concepts, provided across distance and time barriers. Telematic solutions implemented as anew field of service in ophthalmological practice or in hospitals must fulfill the following obligatory requirements in conformity with the law: patients must be informed about the range of telemedical solutions, operators must ensure medical specialist qualifications and all care responsibilities combined with the telemedical services must be guaranteed. The legal assessment standard is always the direct comparison between telemedical measures and the individual patient result of medical treatment in a face to face situation in an ophthalmologists practice as the gold standard. The court makes a targeted examination on whether the individual damage to health of a patient under telemedical care would also have normally occurred under medical treatment within the framework of regular care by a medical specialist in apractice or clinic. If the court has a well-founded doubt, the operator must be able to justify either constraints in individual cases or abetter prognosis and success rate (reversal of burden of proof). Especially due to the latter aspect it is important for the operator that the standards for telemedical services of the specific medical fields are predefined by the specialist societies or that corresponding results from healthcare research projects are available.

Defeasible Reasoning and Informal Fallacies

This paper argues that some traditional fallacies should be considered as reasonable arguments when used as part of a properly conducted dialog. It is shown that argumentation schemes, formal dialog models, and profiles of dialog are useful tools for studying properties of defeasible reasoning and fallacies. It is explained how defeasible reasoning of the most common sort can deteriorate into fallacious argumentation in some instances. Conditions are formulated that can be used as normative tools to judge whether a given defeasible argument is fallacious or not. It is shown that three leading violations of proper dialog standards for defeasible reasoning necessary to see how fallacies work are: (a) improper failure to retract a commitment, (b) failure of openness to defeat, and (c) illicit reversal of burden of proof.