Suzanne Humphries, MD
International Medical Council on Vaccination
05/15/2010
Do doctors swear an oath to the CDC? The FDA? The AMA? Just who are doctors responsible to anyway?
Most doctors do swear an oath upon leaving medical school and it is named after an ancient physician named Hippocrates, who practiced medicine around 400 BCE. The Hippocratic Oath is known to most for its promise that doctors will “do no harm”, a phrase found in its original Greek version. Over the millennia, the Hippocratic Oath has been rewritten several times in order to suit the values of different cultures. The version most commonly used in medical school graduations today was written in 1964 by Louis Lasagna, Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University(1). There are four parts of the oath that are worth discussing in relation to today’s medical environment:
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.
How often can this type of medicine happen within the walls of medical centers today, with their pressured sick-care construct? Doctors will be the first to tell you that there simply isn’t enough time. They can’t give this type of attention to the sick people in their waiting rooms with only 15-30 minute office visits.
If this first section of the Oath was honored, medical doctors would practice the art of caring for the entire being. They would have the restraint to NOT prescribe suppressive medicines that result in the need for increasingly more drugs, driving the original problems deeper and deeper. They would see that their drug-based medicine further crowds the waiting rooms of the sick-care institutions.