There may be only three kinds of professionals whose communication with their respective clients are generally privileged under Philippine Rules of Court: the lawyer, the doctor, and the minister or priest. Surely it must not be plain serendipity for our law to accord these three that kind of respect; it must have something to do with our culture’s regard for them. At one time or another a family could have aspired to have a lawyer, a doctor, or a minister/priest among its members. But for me, I took the dream a few steps further: I once aspired to be a priest, but ended up finishing medicine. Now I am at a crossroads—should I continue my already halfway study of law?
My dilemma has been made more acute, what with the line of questioning encountered by the solicitor general once his turn to argue for the Reproductive Health (RH) Law arrived. It really does not matter whether or not I am for the measure. When I found out that some justices of our Supreme Court seemed to be redefining “hypothesis” in the sense of a presumption (it is not, seriously) and selectively quoting “evidence” from the World Health Organization only if it would suit their preferences, I was struck like the apostle Paul (then, Saul) on the way to Damascus.
Was I mistaken when I strayed off the road more taken by newly minted doctors (i.e., residency training/specialization) and decided to test my mettle in law school? Was I wrong to assume that the scientific standards of evidence by which medical professionals are guided to save lives would have an equivalent in the logic used by the legal mind?
On the other hand, maybe this clash of the three professions (all right, let’s say “calling” for the sake of the religious) as regards the RH Law is simply confusion brought about by their different language games. After all, shouldn’t all of their intents and purposes be for the greater good of humanity? Or does that hold for us doctors only?
—ALBERT FRANCIS E. DOMINGO, MD,
@AlbertDomingo