What you need to know aboutTattoos :Medical Applications, Complications, Ethical and Legal Aspects

Book excerpt: Tattoos are one of the most popular and prevalent forms of body art which has been practiced for centuries in many cultures, throughout the world.  In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, tattoos were as much about self-expression as they were about having a unique way to identify a person’s body. In fact, evidence of tattoos has been found in Egyptian mummies dating 4000 years back and among the Roman gladiators who used it for the purpose of identification The descriptive, decorative patterns have not only been used as a means of identification but have established itself in the field of medicine as well, being employed as a therapeutic modality or diagnostic method. These include: · Corneal tattooing, · Gastrointestinal tattooing during endoscopy, · Reconstructive and · Cosmetic tattooing for camouflage, · Radiotherapy field marking etc. An emerging application of tattooing is medical alert tattooing often practiced by the patients themselves without medical consultation inscribing their disease condition or allergy to a particular medication which may affect diagnosis or treatment. However, tattoos indicating advance health directives (do not resuscitate/do not defibrillate) or the organ donor tattoo pose ethical and legal problems as they may not reflect patient’s current wishes. Furthermore, they are not recognized as meeting any of the legal requirements, so they cannot be considered as valid directives or as consent, but only as a way to guide treatment decisions. Thus an attempt has been made in this Booklet to outline a brief review of the numerous applications, its advantages, potential drawbacks along with the ethical and legal issues related to it. …… Dr. H. K. Saboowala. M.B.(Bom)M.RS.H.(London)