Chapter 2. The legal treatment of pain: the State of French law

Abstract

The desire to manage patients’ pain as a constituent and essential element of the therapeutic act is a relatively recent phenomenon in France. For this to happen there had to be a real cultural change and pain had to stop being considered as an inevitable result of nature. As a new object of the therapeutic relationship, the treatment of pain also has its place in law, as if the medicalisation of a phenomenon necessarily had to be accompanied by its legalisation.
The French legislative texts make this management a legal obligation, integrated in 1995 into the Code de la Santé Publique for the benefit of all patients; more recently, the law of 9 June 1999 set up a right to access palliative care and the “accompanying” of the patient. However, it remains to determine concretely the exact contours of this obligation which now weighs on hospitals and health professionals, to determine also the consequences of this right of the sick person in terms of sanctions.