Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Religious considerations and language do not typically belong in the professional advice rendered by a doctor to a patient. Among the rationales mounted by Greenblum and Hubbard in support of that conclusion is that religious considerations and language are incompatible with the role of doctors as public officials.1 Much as I agree with their conclusion, I take issue with this particular aspect of their analysis. It seems based on a mischaracterisation of what societal role doctors fulfil, qua doctors. What obliges doctors to communicate by means of content that is expressed in public reason-based language is not that they are public officials. Doctors as doctors are not necessarily public officials.
Rather, doctors have such obligations, because they are professionals. Unlike public officials doctors are part of a profession that is to a significant extent self-governing. This holds true for all professions. The …
Footnotes
Contributors US is the sole author of the document.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Linked Articles
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Responding to religious patients: why physicians have no business doing theology
- Attributes of a good physician: what are the opinions of first-year medical students?
- Physicians’ duty to refrain from religious discourse: a response to critics
- Review of instruments for peer assessment of physicians
- Contrasting ethical policies of physicians and psychologists concerning interrogation of detainees
- Between professional values, social regulations and patient preferences: medical doctors’ perceptions of ethical dilemmas
- Organisational strategies to cultivate professional values and behaviours
- Towards a practical definition of professional behaviour
- Doctors are called on to renew their professionalism
- The physician charter on medical professionalism: a Jewish ethical perspective