AOA Violation of Ethics

Submitted by Anonymous (United States), Sep 14, 2008 at 17:16

The AOA Code of ethics states the following:

Section 3. A physician-patient relationship must be founded on mutual trust, cooperation, and respect. The patient, therefore, must have complete freedom to choose her/his physician. The physician must have complete freedom to choose patients whom she/he will serve. However, the physician should not refuse to accept patients because of the patient's race, creed, color, sex, national origin or handicap. In emergencies, a physician should make her/his services available.

http://www.osteopathic.org/index.cfm?PageID=aoa_ethics

There are several problems:

1. This female student's religious beliefs are in conflict of interest with medical ethics.

2. The courts should not have jurisdiction determining the ethical codes of the medical profession.

The code of ethics should be instituted in every AMCAS, ERAS applications as a requirement that to even apply for medical school or osteopathic medical school or residency/fellowship training that you have to agree to not refuse a patient based on gender, sexual orientation, color, creed ,ethnicity. If you can't do that - you don't belong in medicine.

Doctors are supposed to be impartial. Once you are in your own private practice do what you want, but to impose someone's personal beliefs in conflict of medical ethics is a direct threat to the safety of the public good. At some point she will be on call and will have an emergency situation involving a male patient - her beliefs doom that patient. She must not be permitted to be in any clinical situation without first agreeing to not refuse care of any patients based on their gender.

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