Doctors, Ethics, and the Duty of Care in Modern Medicine
This paper examines the state of ethical practice in contemporary medicine by reviewing several scholarly articles. Drawing on sources from medical ethics, general practice training, and pediatric law, it explores whether physicians demonstrate adequate care and ethical responsibility toward their patients. Key issues addressed include the absence of genuine care in doctor-patient relationships, the ethics of prescribing drugs for enhancement purposes, the controversial model of concierge medicine, pediatric consent dilemmas, and the role of ethics education in medical training. The paper argues that ethical behavior and genuine care must be inseparable from medical practice, and that significant gaps remain in how these values are taught and applied.
- Introduction: Ethical Questions in the Medical Profession: Framing questions about physician ethics and care
- Harm in the Absence of Care: The Doctor-Patient Relationship: Martinsen's argument for care-centered medical ethics
- Teaching Ethics in General Practice Training: Daniels on integrating ethics into GP curricula
- Prescribing Enhancements: Ethical Implications: Survey of physicians on enhancement prescribing ethics
- Concierge Medicine and Social Responsibility: Ethical concerns about exclusive, fee-based medical access
- Ethics, Law, and Pediatric Medicine: Pediatric consent dilemmas and legal interventions
- Ethics Education in Resident Clinics and Conclusion: Ethics frequency in resident training and paper conclusion
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What makes this paper effective
- Synthesizes multiple peer-reviewed sources to build a coherent argument about ethical gaps in modern medicine rather than relying on a single perspective.
- Uses concrete case examples — such as the patient Martin and the 1959 Melbourne blood transfusion case — to ground abstract ethical principles in real human consequences.
- Raises pointed rhetorical questions throughout that keep the reader engaged and signal the paper's evaluative stance without overreaching into unsupported claims.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective source integration: each article is introduced with author credentials or journal context, summarized for its main argument, and then critically evaluated in relation to the paper's central claim. This move — summary followed by analysis — is a foundational skill in academic writing, showing the reader both what a source says and why it matters.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a series of guiding questions that frame the inquiry, then devotes one section per source article, allowing each to illuminate a distinct dimension of medical ethics (care, training, enhancement, access, pediatric law). A brief conclusion synthesizes the findings and restates the normative claim that ethics and healthcare must always go together. This source-by-source organization suits an undergraduate literature review format well.
Introduction: Ethical Questions in the Medical Profession
Is there currently a lack of sustainable ethical behavior in the medical profession? Do doctors care enough, and are their ethical behaviors adequate for the trust that patients must place in them? What should doctors be doing to make their practice more ethical and to provide more genuine care to their patients? These questions will be reviewed and examined through the lens of several scholarly sources.
Harm in the Absence of Care: The Doctor-Patient Relationship
The feature article for this paper is titled "Harm in the Absence of Care: Towards a Medical Ethics That Cares." Its author, a professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Oslo in Norway, argues that contemporary medicine and medical ethics suffer from "the lack of a theoretically sustainable concept of care" (Martinsen, 2011, 174). The main points of the article concern the need for more ethical practices in medicine and more genuine caring on the part of both hospitals and physicians. Martinsen explains that a stronger, more sincere doctor-patient relationship is necessary to provide truly human care to patients.
Martinsen concludes that while the ethics of care in medicine and healthcare has had a powerful influence on nursing, the same cannot be said for physicians. In fact, the concept of "care" appears frequently and prominently in nursing literature and ethics materials. But in the broader medical literature relating to doctors and the healthcare industry, the ethical concept of care is "still situated at the margins."
To illustrate this problem, Martinsen describes a 49-year-old man named Martin who has been experiencing severe headaches. He calls his doctor, who refers him to the hospital. After lying there for a long time, a doctor arrives late at night and informs him that an MRI has revealed a "highly malignant brain tumor" (Martinsen, 175). The doctor tells him he may live only a few more months and that there is no cure. He asks Martin whether he has any questions and then "promptly leaves, leaving the patient alone" (Martinsen, 175). The doctor left Martin feeling "numb," and Martin described being left alone after receiving such devastating news as causing "chaos in my body" (Martinsen, 175).
Was that an ethical, caring thing for the doctor to do? It clearly was not — it was uncaring and therefore unethical. This example, among others provided by Martinsen, shows that doctors are too detached from the emotional realities of their patients. One of the core principles in medical ethics is autonomy, which refers to the rights of patients — including the right to determine what happens to their own body, the right to informed consent, and the right to participate in the medical decision-making process (Martinsen, 180).
Care, according to Martinsen, involves sympathy, compassion, and altruistic virtues. It is an essential component of the ethical behavior of healthcare professionals. In order to truly care for patients, doctors need to practice "good deeds" and take "positive steps to help others" — which Martinsen believes is not always the case today (180).
Teaching Ethics in General Practice Training
An article by Katy Daniels argues that there is a pressing need to teach ethics more deliberately to future doctors. Ethical dilemmas must be resolved, Daniels suggests, and to that end the Royal College of General Practice put in place a new curriculum for training general practitioner doctors. This approach is significant, Daniels explains, because it benefits future physicians by "having ethics teaching integrated with clinical work" (Daniels, 2012, 75).
Daniels identifies several best practices for teaching ethics in medical school: (a) induction — making trainees aware of how central ethics is to medical practice; (b) integration — incorporating ethics into every aspect of a doctor's training rather than treating it as a separate subject; (c) inclusion — since ethics is not a stand-alone topic isolated from other medical issues, it must be taught to all staff, and doctors should serve as role models; and (d) individual application — giving all doctor trainees the opportunity to discuss and reflect on "ethical problems they have encountered with their peers" (Daniels, 75). This framework reflects a broader recognition that ethics in healthcare must be woven into professional identity from the earliest stages of training.
Works Cited
Carrese, Joseph A., McDonald, Erin L., Moon, Margaret, Taylor, Holly A., Khaira, Kiran, Beach, Mary Catherine, and Hughes, Mark T. (2011). Everyday ethics in internal medicine resident clinic: an opportunity to teach. Medical Education, 45(7), 712–721.
Daniels, Katy. (2012). Integration of ethics teaching within GP training. Education for Primary Care, 23(2), 75–78.
Hotze, Timothy D., Shah, Kavita, Anderson, Emily E., and Wynia, Matthew K. (2011). "Doctor, Would You Prescribe a Pill to Help Me…" A national survey of physicians on using medicine for human enhancement. The American Journal of Bioethics, 11(1), 3–13.
Martinsen, Elin. (2011). Harm in the absence of care: Towards a medical ethics that cares. Nursing Ethics, 18(2), 174–183.
Thompson, Richard E. (2009). The ethics of exclusivity: Should doctors practice concierge medicine? Physician Executive, 35(5), 96–99.
Waller, Louis. (2011). Ethics, law and paediatric medicine. Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, 47(9), 620–623.
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