The addition to the Code of Medical Ethics of an article explicitly prohibiting physicians from any sexual relationship with the patients for whom they provide follow-up was requested via the Hippocrates petition.
“A patient is not a simple adult free of his choices. The therapeutic relationship creates a well-known vulnerability called transference love”, recall the first signatories, including Jean-Paul Hamon, president of the Federation of Doctors of France, Irene Frachon, pulmonologist who revealed the scandal Mediator, Marilyn Baldeck of the European Association against Violence Against Women at Work, the designer Pénélope Bagieu, or the psychiatrist Muriel Salmona.
In this petition, the signatories highlight the testimony of three women (Married, Cassandra, Ariadne) sexually abused by their psychiatrist, to support their request to the Minister of Health, Agnès Buzyn, that a new article be included in the Code of medical ethics thus drafted “The doctor must refrain from all sexual relations with the patients of whom he has load”.
Today, this prohibition no longer exists in the updated version of the Code of Medical Ethics, lent by all future doctors when defending their thesis. “Likewise, the Code of Medical Ethics, legally enforceable against doctors because it is part of the Public Health Code, does not include any explicit prohibition concerning doctor / patient sexuality”, explains Dr Dominique Dupagne General practitioner, creator of the site atoute.org.
The Order of Physicians mobilized against sexual harassment
The Order of Physicians had published in October 2017, a communicated calling on victims of sexual harassment by a doctor to file a complaint. Patrick Bouet, president of the National Council of the Order of Physicians, explained that “We, doctors, must be exemplary. Sexual harassment is intolerable and must be fought on a daily basis, in the medical environment as elsewhere”.
In a report produced in 2000, entitled “Medical practice and sexuality“, the National Council of the Order of Physicians affirmed that its disciplinary section had” had to deal with about forty cases of sexual harassment during the last ten years “.
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