A atividade de trabalho do dentista "traduzida" pela linguagem dos advogados, em processos civis

Abstract

Since the Consumer´s Defense Code (CDC - Law n. 8.078) was issued on September 11th, 1990, the number of legal proceedings against health professionals has greatly increased. Such problem and the paucity of researches related to it in the Dentistry literature justify the interest for the subject. The current study aims at reflecting upon the liability of the dentist, under the perspective of the discourse s analyst, by focusing not on the activity context (in the dental office), but on documents of civil lawsuits against dentists. Based on the theoretical-methodological principles of MAINGUENEAU´s discursive Discourse Analysis (interdiscourse primacy; discursive field and space; global semantics of initial petition and refutation discursive positioning), this study analyses how such liability is interpreted by the Plaintiff´s and the Defendant´s lawyers´ argumentation. The research methodology included interviews (PUCSP's Research Ethics Committee Protocol n. 70/2006) with the legal consultant of the S.Paulo Dental Surgeons Association, in order to: i) get information related to the civil lawsuit area; ii) select similar juristic acts, belonging to her own files, since the legal consultant was the dentists´ lawyer in all cases; and iii) collect the selected formal applications. Thus, by crossing the frontiers of the stricto sensu language´s studies and proposing to think about the legal duty of the dentist to inform the patient/consumer in a clear, adequate and appropriate form under the CDC´s heading of Article 14th, a bridge is built between Human Sciences (Discourse Analysis; Law Science), Health Sciences (Dentistry), and the discipline that studies the human activity of work (Ergology). The corpus of analysis is constituted by the initial petition and the correspondent refutation of four indemnity legal actions for physical and moral losses and damages, settled at different Courts of Justice in São Paulo between the years 2001 and 2005. In order to analyze these documents it was taken into account: (a) the constitutive polemic between these two enuncitive positioning´s discourses; and (b) the triple function of the language, in the lawyers´ reported discourses: the language (of the dentist) at work; the language (of the lawyers) as work; and the language (of both lawyers) about the work (of the dentist). The analysis´ results suggest that, when recovering the facts that occurred in the dental office, the lawyers´ argumentation translates discursively the complexity of the dentist´s work activity; and they demonstrate that when a disagreement between dentist and patient occurs, the probability of the establishment of a liability process is always possible to happen because of the language´s non-transparency