Has Medicine Lost Her Soul?
The Western medical tradition has held to, and to a large extent still echoes, the Hippocratic tradition enhanced by the Judeo-Christian ethic. Unfortunately, many medical schools now teach very little about appropriate ways to handle the power disparity that defines the relationship between the medical practitioner and the patient. Several schools have even taken to modifying the oath, one might argue arbitrarily, if the students are even asked to take an oath at all.
We have lost a standard for physician conduct because we no longer possess a common understanding of the purpose of medicine. This loss of purpose and attendant confusion of behavior has eliminated the filters needed to understand and manage the ethical dilemmas. The problem is only exacerbated by the explosion of technological advances, the heterogeneity of culture and actual human rights abuses. This situation has provoked government regulation as the final arbiter of what is considered acceptable medical care in place of the physician.
Some obvious examples of medicine permitting government intrusion into clinical care are stem cell research, abortion, euthanasia, and physician assisted suicide. The medical community has consistently knuckled under the cultural pressure and submitted itself to being used as a tool for ends traditionally considered the opposite of the purpose of medical care. The original Hippocratic Oath states, “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.”
Inadequate reflection on those few phrases applied to current use of medicine has yielded no small amount of institutional transgressions. The medical profession permitting this degree of malpractice to be mainstreamed demonstrates a severe collective waywardness. It is in danger of being usurped as a tool for the powerful to control and intimidate a population in the name of “access” and “choice.”
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