RESUMEN
Legal medical doctors (LMDs) expertise encompasses a wide range of responsibilities. Work-related stress amongst LMDs is an extremely relevant factor, which affects the quality of LMDs life and work. Whilst it is a better-known problem abroad, this issue is poorly debated in Italy, as demonstrated by this literature analysis. The aim of this paper is to better understand the main sources of stress in the practice of legal medicine in Italy, highlighting the need for systematic psychological support. The risks of work-related stress for the social and health professions are well known in literature. In Italy, however, due to a series of complex circumstances and cultural and research delays, forensic practitioners often seem to be excluded from these kinds of complex issues. The authors, after a series of considerations drawn from a review of the literature and from experience in the forensic and medical field, point out how work in this area entails risks for workers, on par with all others belonging to the helping and social-health professions. They conclude their contribution with a series of proposals for appropriate protocols to cope with such problems for workers in the forensic and medical field. Key points: Work-related risks for the social and health professionals are widely recognized in the literature.Although legal medical doctors are often thought to be safe from these types of issues, significant risks exist for this category as well.It is important to create appropriate protocols to address outcomes for legal medical doctors.
RESUMEN
In case of thoracoabdominal gunshot wounds (GSW), diaphragmatic lesions are common autopsy findings. In these cases, the bullet's path involves both the thorax and the abdomen, so the diaphragm (the muscle that separates the two cavities) is frequently damaged. In the present report we illustrate a very unusual autopsy finding, came up after a man was shot twice and affected by a lethal thoracoabdominal gunshot wound. In particular, as expected based on CT scans, the corpse exhibited a thoracic-abdominal path and a retained bullet in the abdomen, but no diaphragmatic lesions or hemorrhagic infiltrations of this muscle have been detected during the autopsy. After a scrupulous examination and the section of all the organs, the intracorporeal projectile's path was reconstructed, inferring that the thoracoabdominal transit of the bullet extraordinarily had occurred in correspondence of the diaphragmatic inferior vena cava's ostium, thus exploiting a natural passage without damaging the diaphragmatic muscle.
