The Hippocratic Oath

Despite the continual jurisdictional claim challenges to the expert knowledge of physicians, the medical profession is alive and thriving, but how many more changes to educational standards can it survive? These changes to the education standards of the profession affect more than just the profession, they also effect the health of patients and their everyday lives. The process of inference, diagnosis, and treatment requires a practitioner to retrieve stored knowledge from their brain in order to run diagnostic inferences according to the patients’ unique medical history(Goode). The novice professional must learn through experience, by gaining knowledge through watching mentors as the practice their skills. Without mentor training the novice professional is left with only book knowledge to perform his duties, and if …show more content…
It is an affirmation to abide by the ethical standards of medicine. The second line of the oath is as follows: “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”. This is clearly an important aspect of the medical profession, but can students who exploited loopholes to attain their position say that they respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps they follow? Can these students say that they that they will recognize and work within the limits of their competency? They cannot say such things, because they avoided admitting that their level of competency was below those standards set by the physicians that came before them. This is clearly not an oath that can be followed by the individuals whose drive for wealth and prestige cause them to forsake their ethical values prior to their first day of medical school. Medical ethics is about placing the interest of the patients first before the interest of the