Transformation of human pain into a legal procedure: a cross-sectional study based on content analysis of court cases on compensation for harm to life and health

BACKGROUND: Sociological aspects of relationships between patients and medical organizations in situations involving harm to life and health remain insufficiently studied despite the availability of official judicial statistics. Existing studies of legal language rarely focus on judicial acts as a source for analyzing social relationships. The present study aims to address this gap.

AIM: This study aimed to explore social relationships between patients and medical organizations regarding compensation for harm to life and health using content analysis of judicial acts.

METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted using content analysis. The sample included 112 judicial acts in cases on compensation for harm to life and health, selected from the ConsultantPlus database for 2021–2025. The texts of the acts were combined into a single corpus and processed using the NLTK library in the Python 3.11 environment, including tokenization, lemmatization, and frequency analysis. Common and standard legal terms were excluded from the analysis.

RESULTS: Based on the analysis of the 200 most frequent words, four semantic groups describing the problem field were identified: “Core of Legal Violation” (care, defect, violation), “Consequences for the Patient” (harm, health, suffering), “Standards of Proof” (expert examination, causation, conclusion), and “Judicial Process and Claims” (compensation, reimbursement, hospital). Three key contradictions were identified: 1) a conflict between formalized procedures and the patient’s personal experience; 2) bureaucratization of suffering; and 3) the dual nature of medicine as both a sphere of care and a domain of market relations.

CONCLUSION: Content analysis of judicial acts confirmed its effectiveness as a method for sociological interpretation of legal conflicts. The results revealed a complex interplay of meanings and motivations among the participants in the process. The main limitation of the study is the sample size; more detailed conclusions require analysis of a larger number of judicial acts, taking into account regional and court-level characteristics.