Venting What they don’t tell you about the Hippocratic Oath

[alexit]

Doctors hold up the Hippocratic Oath as a reason for why they're against assisted suicide. LET'S just say that is a bowl of cherry picking.

1. Hippocrates (or whoever wrote the oath; there's debate about that) meant for the oath to be taken only by men.

2. The oath says a doctor can not use a knife (or scalpel) while treating a patient.

3. The oath says medical school should be FREE: "to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without fee or indenture." (This one made me laugh out loud.)

4. The oath is anti-abortion.

I mention this because doctors hold up this oath as the be-all, end-all of medical ethics. If they truly upheld the oath, there wouldn't be any female doctors, doctors wouldn't use anything sharp to treat a patient, they would offer medical school for free and they would have to be locked into a position of being anti-abortion. I don't know of any who would uphold all the tenets of the Hippocratic Oath, so them citing "Do no harm" could just as easily be "Don't ever use a scalpel."

It's an outdated oath, and the fact that it's still referenced shows how lazy the argument of anti-patients rights pro-lifers is.

 

[strand]

That's pretty interesting. I never knew they use this as a pro-life argument. (and I bet pro-birth doctors use it as well) But yeah, generally I think claiming you reject a view because you uphold another view doesn't really explain why you reject the first view, at least for some cases, like assisted suicide, it's a lacking argument.

 

[Marktheghost]

1. Hippocrates (or whoever wrote the oath; there's debate about that) meant for the oath to be taken only by men.

Yay! I've got a female doctor. Maybe I can talk her into helping me die after all!

 

[Meretlein]

"Do no harm" is a very vague statement that is subject to cultural and philosophical ideas. I would say that trapping people in an existence they never asked for constitutes harm.

 

[alexit]

"Do no harm" is a very vague statement that is subject to cultural and philosophical ideas. I would say that trapping people in an existence they never asked for constitutes harm.

How very true.

 

[MrAsclepius]

As with most of today's justifications based on past quotes/philosophy, it is all up to their interpretation (which is most often incorrect). Cherry picking is a great way to put it. We also have to remember that philosophy is ever-evolving, no matter how much people will deny it. In a perfect world we would recognize the values of the oaths we are taking, but this world is far from perfect, and I guarantee you 90% of the medical students who take the oath have never further looked into it. In the end, they are all under agreement of 'do no harm', the rest matters little to them.

 

[schopenh]

Doctors take the Hippocratic oath because it's a cultural tradition. They may not believe in a word of it and crucially it's just a personal oath, it's not bound by law and can't be used in court. They ream it off at their graduation ceremony because they're expected to. (I myself take part in many traditions in my family that I not only don't care for, but disagree with, just because it's far, far more simpler to do than not to do). The Hippocratic oath is basically completely meaningless. If a doctor uses it as an argument for anything, they are circumventing actually thinking about and discussing the issue. It's akin to saying (and I apologise in advance for what appears like religious bashing, it just was the first example that came to my head) "I think homosexuality is wrong because I'm a Christian." Which begs the question, "Well then do tell why Christianity believes it to be wrong?" That is, do you blindly follow a list of rules set out by somebody or something else or do you actually believe in this ideology and if so, why?
If a doctor says they can do no harm and therefore can't perform an assisted suicide well then they aren't acknowledging and grappling with the fact that by virtue of their inaction, a tremendous amount of avoidable suffering (harm) may be done to a person that could be completely avoided. If this hasn't occurred to them in the decades they have been a doctor then what hope really is there?
I have two friends who are doctors, both of them said in medical school about 80% of the class were not thinkers, they were just really good at absorbing information (which is very, very important for medicine). So they could pass their tests with flying colors, but they couldn't actually discuss anything in a meaningful way or outside the context in which they had learned. Interestingly, the same phenomena happened in my physics degree. People were doing better than me in coursework because they had a system where the homework problem solutions were being passed around in friend circles, originally obtained from the actual thinkers in the friend groups. You had people passing extremely difficult exams because the lecturers assign the same questions every year otherwise everyone fails. So these people, through monotonous repetition, which just learn off the answers for everything and do really well. But at the end of the degree they learned virtually nothing about physics and everything about how to pass exams.
What a ramble I went on. Have a nice day if you read this far lol.

 

[Superdeterminist]

By opposing assisted suicide, they are complicit in the continuation of harm.

 

[alexit]

Doctors take the Hippocratic oath because it's a cultural tradition. They may not believe in a word of it and crucially it's just a personal oath, it's not bound by law and can't be used in court. They ream it off at their graduation ceremony because they're expected to. (I myself take part in many traditions in my family that I not only don't care for, but disagree with, just because it's far, far more simpler to do than not to do). The Hippocratic oath is basically completely meaningless. If a doctor uses it as an argument for anything, they are circumventing actually thinking about and discussing the issue. It's akin to saying (and I apologise in advance for what appears like religious bashing, it just was the first example that came to my head) "I think homosexuality is wrong because I'm a Christian." Which begs the question, "Well then do tell why Christianity believes it to be wrong?" That is, do you blindly follow a list of rules set out by somebody or something else or do you actually believe in this ideology and if so, why?
If a doctor says they can do no harm and therefore can't perform an assisted suicide well then they aren't acknowledging and grappling with the fact that by virtue of their inaction, a tremendous amount of avoidable suffering (harm) may be done to a person that could be completely avoided. If this hasn't occurred to them in the decades they have been a doctor then what hope really is there?
I have two friends who are doctors, both of them said in medical school about 80% of the class were not thinkers, they were just really good at absorbing information (which is very, very important for medicine). So they could pass their tests with flying colors, but they couldn't actually discuss anything in a meaningful way or outside the context in which they had learned. Interestingly, the same phenomena happened in my physics degree. People were doing better than me in coursework because they had a system where the homework problem solutions were being passed around in friend circles, originally obtained from the actual thinkers in the friend groups. You had people passing extremely difficult exams because the lecturers assign the same questions every year otherwise everyone fails. So these people, through monotonous repetition, which just learn off the answers for everything and do really well. But at the end of the degree they learned virtually nothing about physics and everything about how to pass exams.
What a ramble I went on. Have a nice day if you read this far lol.

I read this far. Made me feel better about struggling with organic chemistry. I've always been a lone pupil. Shoulda joined a circle.

 

[schopenh]

I read this far. Made me feel better about struggling with organic chemistry. I've always been a lone pupil. Shoulda joined a circle.

It probably benefited you in the long term for independent thought (provided you passed your degree)

 

[EmbraceOfTheVoid]

The medical profession's classic prescription for coping with such predicaments, Primum non nocere (First, do no harm), sounds better than it is. In fact, it fails to tell us precisely what we need to know: What is harm and what is help? However, two things about the challenge of helping the helpless are clear. One is that, like beauty and ugliness, help and harm often lie in the eyes of the beholder--in our case, in the often divergently directed eyes of the benefactor and his beneficiary. The other is that harming people in the name of helping them is one of mankind's favorite pastimes. -Thomas Szasz

 

[alexit]

It probably benefited you in the long term for independent thought (provided you passed your degree)

I did graduate but I did abandon the biology degree I planned to pursue. It was mostly for the best. The biology degree was definitely not for me. I love the degree I received. Two actually: English and Creative Writing. I had a blast as a journalist so I used and continue to use what I learned. I eventually went heavy on the tech side so a Computer Science degree alongside the writing degrees would have helped me. But I made a conscious decision at the time not to pursue computer science because even though I had clear aptitude for it, it bored me to tears. It was only until later that I found something interesting to do in tech. Sorry, this is more than you expect. Thank you for letting me think things things through. I'm at another crossroads, and just evaluating things.

 

[Sprite_Geist]

Ideally medical ethics should be about being compassionate towards life, and sometimes the most caring thing you can do is to end a life not continue it. There is a difference between compassion and preservation.