Medicine functions outside of the law and has fashioned its own codes of conduct. Although an arm of government it also functions as a state within a state in which doctors act as little more than commissars. If a patient does not do as the doctor demands, he or she can suffer punishments such as the withdrawal of treatments.

In psychiatry, the doctor has absolute control of patients and can perform invasive brain therapies on very young children, employ memory-destroying ECT on the basis of subjective judgement and medical authority. In this specialisation, as a patient you lose many of your democratic rights on the word of a doctor.