How medical training mangles professionalism the prolonged death of compassion

Abstract

I am a philosopher by training and a physician by vocation. What this means is that my sensibilities are profoundly practical, but I can take more time than anyone else to explain and defend them. Starting my academic career as a junior faculty member in various academic departments, I have become especially attuned to pedagogical approaches and administrative demands as well as the overt politics of one academy as compared to another. Moving from the humanities to medicine, I have found that the more things change, the more they stay the same. That is, the trends appearing in one department are likewise made manifest in another. Easing out of higher education to go to medical school, I left behind cries for professional responsibility across the curriculum, and applied ethicists including myself working to figure out a way to meet that demand. In medicine the same cries are at play-doctors need to be astute professionals-and many are working to address that need at various levels of medical education and practice. Not only are we working to address these needs, but we are continuously faced with proving how we have addressed them as outcomes assessment is more and more the vogue. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.