Medicine

Abstract

The medical profession is one area where pressure for action on human rights issues has come from within its own ranks. This is because doctors and medical personnel run a stronger risk than most other professionals of being caught between two rival allegiances — the doctor’s duties to society’s interests, as vested in the state, and his obligations, laid down in the Hippocratic oath, towards the individual patient. Traditionally, the relationship between doctor and patient has been the basis for all decisions regarding ethical conduct within the profession: the doctor is committed to respecting the patient’s wishes, and must exercise his or her individual judgement regarding treatment in this light.¹ Where the doctor’s primary obligation towards the patient is threatened or encroached upon by the state or other external sources of authority, this moral commitment may, and in many countries does, find itself without formal protection under the law, or from security forces and police who may themselves be accomplices or initiators of repression and violence. By maintaining the obligation towards his patient while under pressure, the doctor or nurse concerned may place himself at risk.