Hi Mountaineer;
Don't take this personally because I think I can understand your quandry.
Put it in context.
Hillary Clinton caused the preventable deaths of 4 Americans in Benghazi and most Conservatives are rightly up in arms about it.
Medicine causes the preventable deaths of over 750,000 people every year and most Conservatives accept these deaths as 'Errors' because "nobody's perfect."
Generally speaking, such errors while tragic, are acceptable so long as they happen to somebody else. This is Conservatism? So long as it's the other guy and his kids?
On the 22nd I asked momMD who identifies as being on the Executive Council of a Hospital a straight up question about the Hippocratic Oath. That was 3 days ago.
She's had time to answer it.
How many times have we heard medical horror stories and the reporter is Shocked when they ask, "but what about the Hippocratic Oath? First Do No Harm?"
This is what I have. Is somebody has better please share it.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/hippocratic-oath-today.html"According to a 1993* survey of 150 U.S. and Canadian medical schools, for example, only 14 percent of modern oaths prohibit euthanasia, 11 percent hold convenant with a deity, 8 percent foreswear abortion, and a mere 3 percent forbid sexual contact with patients—all maxims held sacred in the classical version."
"HIPPOCRATIC OATH: MODERN VERSION
I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:
I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.
I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.
I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.
I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.
I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.
I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.
I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.
I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.
If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.
—Written in 1964 by Louis Lasagna, Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University, and used in many medical schools today."
Do you see the expression First Do No Harm anywhere in it?
It's not just the catch phrase that's absent, but the very sentiment itself that's missing.
