Some weeks from now, my alma mater will initiate new members into our cult. It is an initiation they have eagerly awaited and will gladly accept. I took my own oath five years ago, and apart from knowing that they have expunged the scary curses that the original Hippocratic oath contained, I can’t remember it’s exact wordings.
The oath taken at induction ceremonies have been modified over and over again through the centuries, but I think new Doctors have only seen it as just part of a ceremony that marks the end of many years of toil.
So, even if the oath summarizes all the expectedly altruistic pursuits of our noble profession, the oath is definitely not the doctors’ ethical benchmark. The oath does nothing to the new doctor. When faced with a tricky ethical dilemma, it is not the oath that he turns to for counsel. He does not even remember the oath!
So, no matter how much and how often we panel beat the oath with the goal of scrubbing the slippery floors that ethics these days can present to us, our effort would not have been more than a political declaration about a permissive we are at a particular point in our collective history as physicians.
What exactly dictates for the doctor when commonsense proves insufficient, as is commonly seen in issues of life and dealogoth, dignity and contempt and other opposing shadows that medical practice so regularly cast?
I think what defines the boundaries for us must be ingrained in the fiber of our being, not something we just read out aloud at an occasion. Seeing out a difficult procedure, coming out to see a patient at 3am and other essentially difficult things we get regularly embroiled in need the whole of our being to consent. The force that moves us to act properly must therefore be located in that place, our beings.
Now that being brainy is the commonest reason young people study medicine, coupled with the intellectual demands of becoming and remaining a competent physician, the emphasis tend to shift from the good doctor to the brilliant doctor. The result is that nice doctors are rare these days. We are not to blame though.
Ours is a generation of brilliant doctors. Not much means anything to us if it is not a randomized control of something like Osler Weber-Randu Syndrome.
So, how do we proceed from here? We can decide to become stock-brokers and business moguls. We can see patients strictly on first come, first serve bases. We can fight for our right and go on many strikes. We can ask for senators’ salary. We can even ask for more because we deserve it. We have expedient ways out of these inattention people given to our profession.
Somehow, we will also succeed in nibbling away at the nobility of the medical profession. Until that day, we shall no longer have our nobility to lay claim to. Of course, some may ask ‘whether nobility actually puts food on tables, then, according to a former professor of mine, “You are a medical Technician and not a doctor. Doctors must be of different mold. That is the way they are meant to be.
By
Dr Babatunde Yusuf.
Dr Yusuf Sent in this Piece from the University College Hospital (UCH), Queen Elizabeth way, Ibadan, Nigeria
