The healing profession needs healers: the crisis in medical education.
Issues in Law & Medicine › Vol. 15 Nbr. 2, September 1999
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The healing profession needs healers: the crisis in medical education.
ABSTRACT: In this article, Dean and professor Albert E. Gunn explains that there is something wrong with the medical profession today. The lack of opposition by physicians to current practices that contravene basic human nature is disturbing. Gunn believes an origin of the problem lies in the process of the selection of medical students. Selection has been biased against the very traits that should make a person a good, caring physician. Gunn recommends looking favorably upon, even recruiting, applicants with a broad education in such subjects as history, philosophy, and literature, rather than just basic, technical science knowledge that they are currently being encouraged to study. Applicants should be recruited who are highly educated and able to think for themselves on important issues. Another bias the author has observed is that against applicants who possess a religiously justified morality. Such applicants are asked to justify and defend such a stance. Gunn believes that the fact that applicants who possess these traits are not considered highly desirable, much less preferred, is the basis of the deterioration of the medical profession, and recruiting such independent-minded, ethical, religiously motivated candidates could be the answer to reviving it.
Recently, Dr. Richard Seed sought support for the cloning of human beings. It was quite a leap from Dolly, the first cloned sheep. The reaction was immediate, and the news anchors analyzed the controversy with utmost seriousness. National Public Radio (NPR), with its trademark strained news-speak, was right on the case. The consensus seemed to be that it was a bad idea. The President was against it. The only question was, why? The arguments against cloning a human being seemed to boil down to: we're not ready for this. And where were the physicians? Did any physician or medical professional society articulate a clear argument against the cloning of human beings? Dr. Seed could not get any physicians to help him, but instead of a reasoned evaluation of what cloning inv...See the full content of this document
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