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Determination Of Ethics In The Medical Field Essay

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Take a minute to imagine yourself in the 1950’s, coming down with syphilis, or maybe a form of cancer, and heading to the local hospital for treatment. Does this scenario fill you with fear or comfort? In my personal opinion, the thought of being treated by doctors in that period fills me with dread. The medical ethics of the doctors of the time were not up to par with our current expectations. While many can argue that medical ethics have taken a decline in the recent years, I believe that the standards of the field have made a drastic increase in values, morals, and treatment of patients. In the past, there were many unethical treatments made against minorities such as the poor and black. There were trials and tribulations to …show more content…

Many believe that doctors are breaking the “First do no harm” clause from the Hippocratic oath a physician pledges. With the many scientific advances in the field, there are many procedures and techniques used by doctors, which are believed to lower any ethical or moral treatment that stands in the field. This includes physician assisted suicide, abortion, and the idea of after birth abortion. The article Then and Now: The Descent of Ethics in the Medical Field by Nancy Valco very boldly states, “Today unborn babies themselves routinely have to pass “quality control” prenatal tests to escape abortion. And just recently, two parents won almost $3 million in a ‘wrongful birth’ lawsuit because they claimed they would have aborted their daughter with Down syndrome if the prenatal tests had been accurate.” While this does sound horrific, abortion is legal by law, and it has nothing to do with the doctors or the ethics of the field. Abortion has become a politic issue more than a medical one, which is why I can state with an ease that the medical field has no loss of ethics in the decisions that patients make within their

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