Patients, Society and Healthcare Professionals

Summary

The practice of medicine is a social task in which patient and healer must respect each other’s personal morality and moral agency. The vastly greater power (real or perceived) of the health-care provider and specifically of the physician puts the burden of this fiduciary relationship largely (but not solely) on the shoulders of the health-care provider. While health-care providers cannot—and act ethically—impose their own personal morality on the patient neither can the patient ask physicians to violate their own personal morality. Physicians and other health-care providers cannot simply follow the dictates of their particular HMO, MCO or the rules promulgated by the government (and may, in fact, be faced with quite unpleasant choices) and blame “the system”. They carry a heavy responsibility in trying to resist dictates deemed harmful to their patient. Above all they carry not simply the responsibility of accommodating themselves or resisting a system someone else builds for them but of playing their proper part in building a system which is equitable to all members of the community and flexible enough to change as do circumstances.