Christian Worldview Concepts

Medical Practitioners

Medicine and Morality

As we consider such ethical debates we should note that they are being conducted in a cultural context where a prevailing Judeo-Christian moral consensus is collapsing. The history of Western medicine is a blend of Judeo-Christian moral precepts and Hippocratic medical ethics, an ethical formula that contributed to the development of the best health care system in the world. That tradition is now largely ignored, if not outright reviled. There is not just a subtle drift away from the Judeo-Christian ethic in medicine, but a stampede! Physicians are no longer required nor expected to take an oath "first do no harm." The blending of medical skills and ethical integrity that marked the medical profession for so many centuries is in the process of being replaced by what Nigel Cameron calls a "consumerist-corporatist exercise in the delivery of saleable skills to the market." This change is evidenced by the number of physicians returning to graduate schools in order to get their M.B.A. degree.