The Ethical Conduct of a Physician
By Shahid Athar, MD
Indianapolis, IN
When asked, what advice you would give to your medical resident finishing his/her training and entering in practice, I said the following:
1. Your ability to take care of fellow humans is an honorable gift from God. Be thankful to Him for this and don’t abuse the special privilege given to you. Treat all patients with love and respect as you will our immediate family members.
2. Express your faith by your actions not by your words alone. You will be watched as such by your patients, your colleagues and coworkers as well as by your Creator.
3. When your patients thank you for “saving their life”, you thank them for allowing them to teach you through their illness but know that you are not the healer or giver of life. Healing is from God and you are just an instrument of His healing. After dispensing a medicine or performing a procedure pray for your patient in your heart that it works.
4. Familiarize yourself with the faith of your patient. If you do so, you will be able to communicate with them better by gaining their respect and trust. They may comply better with the treatment plans that you may offer them. While doing so, never try to introduce your religion to them unless they ask a question themselves. They see you as a “secular priest”.
5. Treat all your patients, rich or poor, male or female, young or old, black or white, with faith or no faith, with the same degree of love and compassion. Be careful about their dignity, modesty and privacy. Always examine a female patient in the presence of a female nurse or a female relative.
6. Always uphold the sanctity of life. Be an instrument of healing and never enhance the process of dying even if your patient is disabled, or is in persistent vegetative state.
7. Don’t be an instrument of torture or inhumane treatment of any human under your care irrespective of his or her faith or any alleged crime that he/she may have committed, irrespective of who asks you to do so. Your true employer is God and not the one who issues your paycheck.
8. Explain to your patient yourself all possible dangers and side effects of any medical treatment or procedure that you offer and tell him/her that “this is what I will suggest if you were my close relative”. Give them hope and not just decimal statistics.
9. Continue to advance your medical knowledge and skills otherwise you will be depriving your patients what the latest science and medicine has to offer them.
10. Finally, in your quest for loving care and passion for your profession, don’t neglect your self or your family. Take care of your own health and spend quality time with your family. Both are equally important and one cannot be sacrificed over the other. (Presented during Pitts Memorial Lecture at Medical University of South Carolina, 2006).
