Médecine & Liberté : Le réseau libéral des médecins suisses

Gabriel Calzada

Professeur d'économie à l'Université Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid. Fondateur de Medicina en Libertad  (Medlib.es) et de l'Institut Juan de Mariana, Madrid.

Gabriel est à présent recteur de l'Université Francisco Marroquin, au Guatémala. Il est également président de la Société du Mont-Pélerin.

 

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Médecine & Liberté
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Tél & fax: 41 21 922 60 82

info@medlib.ch

Hippocratic Morality versus Medical Ethics

Despite what many people think, Hippocratic morality and medical ethics are two distinct concepts that are only remotely related.

Hippocratism is a civilizing and humanist professional philosophy that places the individual at the center of its concerns. Conversely what we now call medical ethics is but a set of rules that puts medicine at the service of power.

Hippocratism is a civilizing and humanist professional philosophy that places the individual at the center of its concerns. Conversely what we now call medical ethics is no more than a set of rules that puts medicine at the subservience of power. This is achieved through countless bureaucratic "multidisciplinary ethics committees" # spawned by a so called “right to health” (positive law) resulting from a new gospel, that of Human Rights (1947).

Hippocratic ethics prohibits abortion whereas medical ethics accepts it and and even promotes it. (10,848 abortions were reported in Switzerland in 2008 according to the Swiss federal office of health) Not to mention euthanasia in retirment homes or scientific diddling with embryos. All with the blessing of the State, of its lobbies and its ethical proxies!

It is quite clear that the only connection between Hippocratic morality and modern medical ethics results from gross missapropriation. Contemporary medicine has become a mere tool of any ar all forms of power as demonstrated in the former USSR (psychiatry),  in some Islamic countries (hand cutting surgeons), or in Nazi  Germany (concentration camps) etc. In practice medical ethics will mold to whatever shape that political power chooses.

Indeed medicine has become the tool of power. Besides, whenever government is unable to solve a specific problem, it turns it into a medical problem (courts, army, prisons, etc.). Ethics committees readily accept the thwarted mission endowed upon them by power and will condone in the name of the medical profession, deeds contrary to the Hippocratic morality.

It can be legitimately suspected that medical ethics has become an essential element of the "totalitarisation" of society and its return to barbarism. It is therefore essential that physicians become aware of the difference and opposition between Hippocratic morality and what is brandished as medical ethics. In other words the difference betweeen Hippocrates and Tschudi*

Ernest Truffer MD , Sierre  14/11/2010  -

(Translated  & edited by Alphonse Crespo)

* Editor’s note : Hans Tschudi was the initiator of socialist reforms of  Swiss Healthcare in the 1960’s in the same way as Lyndon Johnson & Barak Obama  would later put American Health care on the same collectivistic & statist path

Ernest Truffer MD

19 février 2011